num_pages: 232
description: How the moves of thirty-two chess pieces over sixty-four squares can help us understand the workings of the mind. When we play the ancient and noble game of chess we grapple with ideas about honesty deceitfulness bravery fear aggression beauty and creativity which echo (or allow us to depart from) the attitudes we take in our daily lives. Chess is an activity in which we deploy almost all our available cognitive resources; therefore it makes an ideal laboratory for investigation into the workings of the mind. Indeed research into artificial intelligence (AI) has used chess as a model for intelligent behavior since the 1950s. In Chess Metaphors  Diego Rasskin-Gutman explores fundamental questions about memory thought emotion consciousness and other cognitive processes through the game of chess using the moves of thirty-two pieces over sixty-four squares to map the structural and functional organization of the brain. Rasskin-Gutman focuses on the cognitive task of problem solving exploring it from the perspectives of both biology and AI. Examining AI researchers' efforts to program a computer that could beat a flesh-and-blood grandmaster (and win a world chess championship) he finds that the results fall short when compared to the truly creative nature of the human mind.
language: English
title: Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind
publisher: The MIT Press