Tue, 10 May 2005
Is Chess the Drosophila of AI? Exploring the Moral Economy of Artificial Intelligence
The title of this paper derives from a quote by the legendary computer scientist John McCarthy: " In 1965, the Russian mathematician Alexander Kronrod said, 'Chess is the Drosophila of artificial intelligence.' However, computer chess has developed much as genetics might have if the geneticists had concentrated their efforts starting in 1910 on breeding racing Drosophila. We would have some science, but mainly we would have very fast fruit flies.
McCarthy and his colleagues in AI this metaphor was appropriate because they saw chess, like the drosophilia, as an ideal vehicle through which to reveal objective truths about the natural world. Historians of science, however, view the drosophila from a different perspective. Building on the work of Robert Kohler, this paper explores the moral economy of the AI community and the unique ways in which the experimental technology of chess shaped the program of AI research in the decade of the 1970s.
category: /research
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