2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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C HESS, GAMES, AND FLIES
ematical) treatment: they are picked up as a source of intuition and then relegated to an
introductory, paradigmatic function. Poker, for example, has become the “standard” non-
perfect information game; “heads and tails” the standard example of the simplest example
to require the use of mixed strategies; more recently, the game of “Nim” has become the
paradigmatic introduction to combinatorial game theory. However, what is characteristic
of, and perhaps unique to, chess, is that it experienced a second scientific life. That life be-
gan immediately after the publication of Game Theory and Economic Behavior and began,
once again, with John von Neumann
3. Combinatorial explosions
The first event that brought chess back into the scientific limelight has to do with the
intellectual evolution of von Neumann and his personal involvement with the RAND corpo-
ration in Santa Monica. RAND (literally, Research and National Development) was a research
institute heavily funded by the military (specifically, the Air Force) that had been created
in 1946 in order to preserve in postwar years the intense collaboration among scientists fu-
eled by War World II that had proved so fruitful to the national military interests. 26 Santa
Monica became one of the centers, with Princeton and, on a lesser scale, Michigan, where
mathematicians worked in developing game-theory and von Neumann was immediately
hired as a consultant. In the immediate postwar years, however, his own interests started to
shift toward the design and construction of electronic computers and, consequently, toward
the automatic resolutions of problems posed by, among other things, game-theory. The pos-
sibility was far from being purely theoretical, since the combination of von Neumann the-
ory and military interests had brought about the construction of one of the first computers
at RAND, appropriately called (apparently against his protestations), the JOHNNIAC.
It is in this context that he started lecturing on chess again, every time emphasizing the
immense complexity of the task ahead. Von Neumann, it should be remarked, lectured on
26. See Philip Mirowski, “When Games Grow Deadly Serious…,” for a detailed analysis.