2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

180
C HESS, GAMES, AND FLIES
lying the computer programs could be easily tested and in some cases even measured by
the strength of the playing program. But the character of the relationship was one-sided: no
specific features of the games could be part of the theories and techniques themselves.
Chess, however, enjoyed a particular status, and it gathered more attention than all the other
games put together. The game attracted the researchers’ attention well before the Artificial
Intelligence paradigm, in the 1940s, when it was routinely used by John von Neumann in
his lectures on Game Theory. 3 In fact, it is after hearing a lecture from von Neumann on
chess at the RAND Corporation in 1952, that Herbert Simon started working on what was to
become the very first program in Artificial Intelligence. The interest in chess increased con-
sistently in the following years and work on chess quickly became so overwhelmingly pop-
ular in the first phase of Artificial Intelligence’s history that its role as a theoretically neutral
test case for theories of thinking in general started to be questioned rather often.
In particular, the highly structured, logical environment provided by chess was not al-
ways accepted as a standard task to measure the presumably general theories provided by
Artificial Intelligence. 4 The rhetorical weapon used against many of these critiques was to
identify chess as AI’s Drosophila, with reference to the fruit-fly whose fast reproductive
cycle made it into a favorite test bed for genetic theories for almost a century. Herbert Si-
mon, one of those most responsible for chess’s popularity, used the analogy widely since
the early 1960s, when AI’s interest in chess was still at its peak. He reports that he used it
routinely in the question and answer sessions after his talks, to defend the study of chess
and other games as a worthwhile research-project. 5
I intend to explore this relationship a bit more deeply, although most likely along dif-
ferent lines from the classic objections Simon and Newell were responding to with their
3. Robert J. Leonard in “Creating a Context for Game Theory,” Toward a History of Game Theory, Annual
Supplement to Volume 24 of History of Political Economy, Roy Weintraub, ed., (Durham: Duke
UP, 1992) 51 reproduces, from the von Neumann’s manuscripts archives in Princeton, the outline of a
series of three lectures that von Neumann gave in Seattle 1940 (before the publication of the book). It
recites: “1. The general problem. The case of Chess. 2. The notion of the “best Strategy.” 3 Problems
in games of three or more players.”.
4. See for example, the rather elaborate defense of chess as a research tool contained in Allen Newell and
Herbert Simon, Human Problem Solving …, in the chapter devoted to the topic.