Chess, Games, and Flies

Research in Artificial Intelligence has always had a very strong relationship with games and gameplaying, and especially with chess. Workers in AI have always denied that this interest was more than purely accidental. Parlor games, they claimed, became a favorite topic of interest because they provided the ideal test case for any simulation of intelligence. Chess is the Drosophila of AI, it was said, with reference to the fruit-fly whose fast reproductive cycle made it into a favorite test bed for genetic theories for almost a century. In this paper I will try to show Artificial Intelligence’s relationship to games is quite different from what this analogy suggests. In fact, I will argue that AI is, at core, a theory of games and a theory of subjectivity as game-playing. 1. Games, game-playing and game theory. It is well-known that research in Artificial Intelligence has always had a very strong relationship with games and game-playing. Much work in the field, especially in its founding years, has been devoted to the development of programs capable of playing chess or checkers, programs smart enough to solve puzzles, etc.1 Chess was a favorite topic, although it was not the only game to receive the researchers’ attention. Indeed, one of the brightest successes of early AI was a checkers playing program devised by A. L. Samuel at the IBM Laboratories, while efforts went also into the development of programs capable of solving cryptarithmetic puzzles, the Hanoi tower puzzle, and other “mathematical recreations.”2 Workers in AI have always denied that this interest was more than purely accidental. Parlor games, they claimed, became a favorite topic of interest because they provided the ideal test case for any simulation of intelligence: a game like chess, for example, can be described by just a handful of rules and yet its complexity defies even the best human minds. However, since we usually take good chess players to be very intelligent human beings in general, it follows that a program capable of playing an acceptable game of chess should be considered as instantiating “intelligent behavior” in general.3 Working on chess and other parlor games allowed AI researchers to leave aside unessential complexities to focus on the relevant issues pertaining to human intelligence. This line of defense is best summed up by an analogy that became very popular in the field: chess are the Drosophila of AI, it was said, with reference to the fruit-fly whose fast reproductive cycle made it into a favorite test bed for genetic theories for almost a century.4 As the validity and scope of genetics is not limited to flies, so the scope and validity of Artificial Intelligence’s theories is not limited to chess and, more generally, to games. In this paper I will try to show Artificial Intelligence’s relationship to games is quite different from what this analogy suggests. In fact, I will argue that AI is, at core, a theory of games and a theory Essays in Philosophy file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/gilm5276/Desktop/Essays%20HTML/franchi.html[9/18/2009 5:07:54 PM] of subjectivity as game-playing. This claim should not be interpreted in a reductive sense: I will not be arguing that the theoretical constructs of AI are only applicable to games. Rather, I will try to show, through a historical and conceptual reconstruction of the genesis of field, that AI came to its basic insights by trying to answer a number of questions that were prompted by its continued interest in chess: what is a game? what does it mean to play a game? Why can we take gameplaying as one of the most basic characteristics of human behavior? Artificial Intelligence is a theory that identifies some of the most basic features of human subjectivity with the basic procedures needed to play a game like chess, I will argue, and it could come to such a conclusion only through a prolonged engagement with chess that produced, at the same time, a theory of games, a theory of game-playing, and a theory of subjectivity as game-