2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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C HESS, GAMES, AND FLIES
acquainted with his work on heuristics. Polya had diverted his attention from the then com-
mon study of the formal structures of proofs as they are presented to the mathematical com-
munity (and as formal logic studies them), and focused instead on the “solving methods”
that bring the mathematician to the discovery of those proofs. He had provided an articulate
summaries of heuristic methods that, although not guaranteeing a solution, can provide the
crucial insights that will bring to it. 36 It is easy (it always is, post factum) to see the conver-
gence between Simon’s concerns and the basic premises of Polya’s studies that the young
Newell had absorbed.
After a year of graduate school at Princeton—where he met most of the leading game-
theorists, but that left him very dissatisfied with the purely mathematical approach to game
theory that was dominant in those years—Newell joined RAND to work on “applied” math-
ematics. There he met Herbert Simon, who, although teaching in Pittsburgh, had been hired
as a consultant and started to spend a few summers there. 37
In his autobiography, Simon notes that he got involved with RAND through the Cowles
commission and started to attend summer seminars in Santa Monica in 1952. The first prod-
uct of his interaction with the game-theorists was the article “A Behavioral Model Of Ra-
tional Choice,” originally a RAND technical report. The paper contained an appendix on
chess that was stimulated by a talk on the topic given by von Neumann that summer. Simon
writes that he thought von Neumann was “overestimating the difficulties substantially, and
moreover I believed I had some solutions for them which I proposed in the appendix [later
excised from the public version].” He later recalls that immediately after he met Newell,
whom he recognized as being far more advanced on the topic, he put his plans for a running
chess-playing program on hold until they started collaborating intensely on the project to-
ward the end of 1955. Soon joined by Cliff Shaw, a system programmer at RAND, they began
working toward the implementation of a program incorporating the profoundly different in-
terpretation of game-theory we have just outlined. The report of their effort was published
36. George Polya, How To Solve It (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1944). Polya writes in the preface to his celebrated
book: “This study [of solving methods], that some authors call heuristics, now is out of fashion.
However, it has a glorious past and, perhaps, a future.” (iii).
37. Herbert Simon, Models Of My Life…,166 and 202.