Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind

Abstract

One of the first goals of the pioneers of AI was to create a program that could play chess. The idea, somewhat naïve, or at least, simplistic, was that if chess is considered an entirely mental activity, the emulation of the game by means of an algorithm would implicitly mean the simulation of thought production. For Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, the development of a chess program was not in itself useful but did offer an enormous gain in understanding of the heuristic needed to solve problems. This gain would be translated into a surge in automatic systems for handling and manipulating data and for practical situations in the world. The evolution of artificial intelligence as a research field shows that this move has been made from research on systems like chess to expert systems that have been used on a multitude of occasions to improve and automate tasks (from medical diagnosis to weather forecasting, two clearly useful examples).