2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

T HE DROSOPHILA OF AI.
tists belonging to the fly group tried to expand their research in hereditary genetics toward
the genetics of development and evolution, where the relationship between environment
and naturally occurring variations became the focus of the analysis. However, I think the
point of the Drosophila example is by now sufficiently clear.
Four points should be retained from the biological analogy. First, there is more than
one passage in each directions, since the interaction itself is a complex process that is con-
stantly retroacting upon itself. Second, and perhaps more importantly, each passage sub-
stantially alters at least some relevant aspects of one of the members of the relationship. For
example, the “standard fly,” an animal painstakingly constructed in the lab throughout a
minute debugging of its genetic material, is a different animal from the original fruit fly that
entered it. Third, the engine propelling the relationship to move back and forth is constitut-
ed by Drosophila’s unexpected capability to generate an ever increasing number of mutants
when undergoing the intense, large-scale inbreeding and selection procedures devised by
the scientists, what Kohler calls the Drosophila’s breeder-reactor autocatalytic features.
Last, but not least, the output of the whole process should not be forgotten: the theory of
the gene. In fact, the theory can best be understood as the object emerging, at the epistemo-
logical level, out of the positive-feedback interaction between geneticists and Drosophila
that the insect’s fantastic (and induced) mutational capacities animated.
The similarities with the introduction of the study of chess into Artificial Intelligence,
as we will see, are remarkable. What makes AI/chess’s case more complex, however, is
that, at the beginning of the process, the two terms of the relationship are far less stable than
their corresponding biological counterparts. Genetics was working along some well stabi-
lized lines at the dawn of this century: the Darwinian framework plus the great amount of
work in heredity that came out of the rediscovery of the Mendelian paradigm. The revolu-
tion the fly group started, in other word, took place within a well-established tradition. On
the contrary, the difficulties intrinsically inherent in the definition of its topic, which I have
explored earlier, made Artificial Intelligence far less stable than genetics. Moreover, and as
importantly, Artificial Intelligent was born at the same time as, and virtually because of, the
interaction with chess. Suffice here to remember that Herbert Simon and Allen Newell be-
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