Chapter 1 The game of chess

The game of chess has sometimes been referred to as the Drosophila of artificial intelligence and cognitive science research a standard task that serves as a test bed for ideas about the nature of intelligence and computational schemes for intelligent systems. Both machine intelligence how to program a computer to play good chess (artificial intelligence) and human intelligence how to understand the processes that human masters use to play good chess (cognitive science) are discussed in the chapter but with emphasis on computers. Classical game theory has been preoccupied almost exclusively with substantive rationality. Procedural rationality is concerned with procedures for finding good actions, taking into account not only the goal and objective situation, but also the knowledge and the computational capabilities and limits of the decision maker. The only nontrivial theory of chess is a theory of procedural rationality in choosing moves. The study of procedural or computational rationality is relatively new, having been cultivated extensively only since the advent of the computer (but with precursors, e.g., numerical analysis). It is central to such disciplines as artificial intelligence and operations research. Difficulty in chess is computational difficulty. Playing a good game of chess consists in using the limited computational power (human or machine) that is available to do as well as possible. This might mean investing a great deal of computation in examining a few variations, or investing a little computation in each of a large number of variations. Neither strategy can come close to exhausting the whole game tree.