A FIVE-YEAR PLAN FOR AUTOMATIC CHESS

Young animals play games in order to prepare themselves for the business of serious living, without getting hurt in the training period. Game-playing on computers serves a similar function. It can teach us something about the structure of thought processes and the theory of struggle and has the advantage over economic modelling that the rules and objectives are clear-cut. If the machine wins tournaments it must be a good player. The complexity and originality of a master chess player is perhaps greater than that of a professional economist. The chess player continually pits his wits against other players and the precision of the rules makes feasible a depth of thinking comparable to that in mathematics. No program has yet been written that plays chess of even good amateur standard. A really good chess program would be a breakthrough in work on machine intelligence, and would be a great encouragement to workers in other parts of this field and to those who sponsor such work. In criticism of the writing of a chess program, Macdonald (1950) quoted a remark to the effect that a machine for smoking tobacco could be built, but would serve no useful purpose. The irony is that smoking machines have since been built in order to help research on the medical effects of smoking. This does not prove that a chess program should be written, but suggests that the arguments against it might be shallow. Many branches of science, and of pure and applied mathematics, have started with a study of apparently frivolous things such as puzzles and games.