2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

G AME THEORETIC GAMES
reductive. The effort focusing on chess as a relevant example of intelligent behavior must
start by defining a certain view on the game that selects some relevant features and declares
them as relevant, or by assuming which features of chess are relevant and which are not.
Yet, the outcomes of the AI/chess process are at least as clean and polished as the the-
ories and tools produced by the biologist. This entails not only that the process is more elab-
orated, since the distance traveled is greater. More importantly, it entails that the dynamic
interaction between Artificial Intelligence and chess produces theories that redefine, and
substantially, their very objects. In other words, the product of the process is as much a the-
ory of thinking as it is a powerful conceptualization of Artificial Intelligence and of chess.
And, by extension, of games.
It is precisely for this reason that I am interested in the relationship between Artificial
Intelligence and chess. First, because, as we seen above, Artificial Intelligence can be in-
terpreted as a special kind of scientific metaphysics, or “non-philosophy,” as I have called
it. And second, because the “non-philosophical” effort comes to its realization through an
essential link with the concept of game. More importantly, the research in Artificial Intel-
ligence, not only uses the concept of game, but, in virtue of the loop it establishes with it,
comes to a conceptualization of it. In other words, it does not just pick up a pre-given intu-
ition of play/game (that is, Spiel, in my terminology), but tries to capture it in a precise con-
cept on the basis on one of its components, namely the game element. An analysis of the
concept provided by AI will therefore help us quite a bit in our efforts to elucidate the rea-
sons underlying the connections between the end of philosophy and play.
2. Game theoretic games
Let us examine how the interaction got started. Games were brought onto the scientific
limelight by John von Neumann, who provided the basic framework for a mathematical
concept of game and proved some important mathematical results about solvability. 11 Von
Neumann, however, was interested in a different use of games: he wanted to use them as
the basis for a model providing a basic mathematical understanding of the kind of behavior
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