2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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C HESS, GAMES, AND FLIES
best] is precisely what human players do: no one plays a perfect game,” he says. Therefore,
the “solution” of the game of chess might be found in the human way of playing chess and,
on the reverse, the performance of a chess-playing computer may be measured against hu-
man performance.
This last point, however, is still a hint in Shannon’s paper and will not receive its full
development until the works of Simon and Newell. What, on the other hand, seems un-
doubtedly his, is the “discovery” of the combinatorial explosion of states as the result of the
dynamic application of the rules. Although this may seem quite a discouraging result, in
fact it plays a role analogous to the breeder reactor’s properties we had seen at work in the
Drosophila/genetics interaction. The “complexity” of the insect lay in its ability to produce
an ever increasing number of mutations when interacting with the experimental methods of
the geneticists. These mutations, by challenging the scientists’ tools, were forcing them to
refine their theories to keep up with the insect’s capacities. Similarly, chess’s “ability” to
turn out ever new forms of combinatorial explosions under the scientists’ pressure to keep
it under control forces them to devise more and more refined methods (read, “theories”) to
keep up with the game’s “complexity.” In both cases, the productive relationship can be es-
tablished because there is a conceptual framework that makes the object’s complexity
thinkable and that allows the search for a solution to start. In genetics’ case, this was the
theory of the gene, in Artificial Intelligence is the conception of a game as a search-space,
e.g. as a space of single, static positions generated recursively by the application of the rules
of the game.
The framework provided by Shannon shifts all the emphasis in the study of chess from
“solving the game,” to “searching the space for an acceptable solution.” The problem of Ar-
tificial Intelligence becomes how to search that space for a solution as good as a human be-
ing could find, providing thus, in a single stroke, a theory of thinking and a theory of chess.
It is the solution of this problem that attracts the attention of Herbert Simon and Allen New-
ell.
Around 1950, Herbert Simon was a young economist working in the “backwaters”
area of industrial organizations and had already published a substantial work, Administra-