2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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C HESS, GAMES, AND FLIES
ist. 28 To be more precise, a chess-playing machine would perhaps demonstrate some intel-
ligence, but the degree of intelligence would not be tied to the quality of the game played.
Chess, in other words, are still used in the “exemplary” mode as an instance of a more
general paradigm, namely symbolic thinking, which can be tested on the simpler domain
provided by games. To put it differently, chess may enter the computer scene because the
problem of “solving” the game, crucial to game theory, has been put aside. “Playing” the
game becomes the central concern, because being able to play an intellectual game like
chess is taken to be a significant test of cognitive abilities. Paradoxically, the quality of the
game being played is less important that the fact that a machine can “play” the way humans
are supposed to. Turing, for example, tested his design for a chess playing computer against
a person who had never played the game before and was taught the rules only a few hours
earlier. The experiment is significative and could not be farther away from game theory’s
concerns. The program’s ability to follow the rules of chess, and perhaps pursue a goal, e.
g. its ability to think, is what is tested, not its absolute performance. Game theory wanted
to find solutions for the games of war and stock bargaining, and could not care less if an
untrained human secretary (Turing’s test case) is or is not capable of understanding their
rules. In the passage from von Neumann to Shannon and Turing, instead, the emphasis
shifts from solving a game expressed in a static form to understanding the process of a dy-
namically conceived game. Does this mean that the concept of a “solution” has to be aban-
doned altogether or is there room for an idea that would bring together the two pieces of
the puzzle? Is it possible to come up with a new conceptualization of “game” that would
allow the theorist to find a solution for the game of chess (as von Neumann wanted), while
allowing a computer to play the game (as Shannon and Turing wanted)? And which kind of
28. This may explain why neither Shannon nor Turing thought so important to actually write the programs;
also, it may explain why the crucial concept of heuristics rules, the technique that would allow a dramatic
improvement in the programs’ performances, was missing, in fact was the only missing element,
from Shannon’s design principle. Claude Shannon, “A Chess-Playing Machine,” Scientific American,
February, 182 (1950) 48 ff., later in James Newman ed.,The World of Mathematics (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1956) vol. 4; Claude Shannon, “Game-Playing Machines,” Journal of the Franklin Institute,
260, 6 (1955) 447-453; Alan Turing’s program and his hand simulation are presented in Bertrand
Bowden, Faster than Thought, a Symposium on Digital Computing Machines (London: Pitman,
1953) 288-295.