2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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C HESS, GAMES, AND FLIES
gan working on chess around 1952 at the RAND Corporation and traveled to the founding
event of Artificial Intelligence, the 1956 Dartmouth summer seminar, well armed with
ideas, and first results. Claude Shannon, himself one of the four organizers of the seminar,
is responsible for the first introduction of chess into computer science, although from a dif-
ferent perspective than Simon’s and Newell’s.
Even more uncertain is the position of chess. In spite of all the changes it would un-
dergo, Drosophila, after all, entered the scientific arena with a well-understood ontological
status and at a well-defined epistemological level. No theoretical reasons set Drosophila
apart from other living beings. It was a living being, but not a “special” living being, like a
virus, for example, whose “borderline” zoological status may bias the experiments in a spe-
cific direction. Second, Drosophila is inconspicuously simpler, or more convenient to
study, than other beings. Whatever the Drosophila does not have in terms of internal func-
tional organization, or does have (reproductive speed, for example) must be theoretically
irrelevant, lest biological research wastes its time on a simplistic case instead of focusing
its energy on a methodologically simpler object. This second point, in turn, entails that the
“object” Drosophila must be sufficiently well understood, at least in principle, in order to
tear apart its “general biological characteristics” from its “particular drosophiliac” features,
so to speak.
Chess does not enjoy the advantages of its flying companion. First, even if we restrict
the topic of AI to intelligent “behavior,” it is not so obvious that playing games is an exem-
plary case of it. Second, it is not granted that chess is a relevant example of ludic activities
in general (I have dwelt on this point at length in chap. II above). Even worse, a case might
be mounted that playing chess is a particularly extreme version of playing in general, mak-
ing therefore chess more like a “virus” than like a “Drosophila.” Third, it is not even grant-
ed what chess is (because we do not know, broadly speaking, what game/play is)—whereas
there are little doubts as to what a fruit fly, genetically speaking, consists of. Thus, the task
of pulling apart the “generally cognitive” characteristics of chess from its “particularly lu-
dic” ones becomes especially thorny. Fourth, and last, once the proper understanding of
chess is provided, it must be explained what makes it simpler, and why the simplicity is not