2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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A NACLASTIC SUPPLEMENTS
tificial Intelligence counterpart. Second, the structure of a myth, for example, is constructed
“bottom-up”, e.g. it is built from a complete description of all the narrative variants that are
actually found in the literature. Each variant constitutes its own context, and the basic rela-
tions used to build the group that generates the structure are found by permutating the ele-
ments in all their contexts.
Thus, a first attempt at a formalization of chess, for example, into a structure (as op-
posed to a search-space) would start not from an abstract description of the “moves” of the
game, e.g. the higher level constraints that make the game possible, but rather from a col-
lection of chess games equivalent of the single variants of a myth: the single games of
chess. It would then proceed to isolate the basic elements of the game, the chess equivalent
of the gross constituent units of the myth. It is not totally clear what these would be. If we
remember that, in the myth, such units are basically found at the sentence level (by analogy
from linguistics) we may try to found a sentence equivalent in the internal dynamic of the
game of chess. A single move of a determinate piece may too small of a unit, whereas a
sequence of moves representing, for example, the development of a piece, e.g. the expres-
sion of a certain action that a piece perform, may probably be better suited to the task. The
concept of heuristic rules can perhaps be reintroduced, with modifications, at this level of
the analysis as the sequence of moves a chess piece (or more) uses to carry out a task like
“occupying the center,” “protecting the king,” etc. From an Artificial Intelligence perspec-
tive, heuristic rules act as a higher level constraint on the search-space that introduce mean-
ingful relations: they act as a constraint higher than the moves themselves that made up the
space in the first place. Thus, they seem a natural candidate for the similar, higher level role
that the gross constituent units play within Lévi-Strauss’s theoretical approach.
The analysis would then proceed, on the basis of the catalog of existing games, to re-
trieve the relations tying together the single constituents and, from then, would try to con-
struct a group binding all the relations in a tidy structure. It should be noted that this
approach to the game of chess, if carried out, would come up with the formalization of a
different object than “the” game of chess that game-theory inspired to Artificial Intelli-
gence. In fact, it would be misleading to call it the game of chess: by analogy with Lévi-