The Role of Chess in Artificial Intelligence Research

Abstract

Our eminent researchers including John McCarthy, Allen Newell, Claude Shannon, Herb Simon, Ken Thompson and Alan Turing put significant effort into computer chess research. Now that computers have reached the grandmaster level, and are beginning to vie for the World Championship, the AI community should pause to evaluate the significance of chess in the evolving objectives of AI, evaluate the contributions made to date, and assess what can be expected in the future. Despite the general interest in chess amongst computer scientists and the significant progress in the last twenty years, there seems to be a Jack of appreciation for the field in the AI community. On one hand this is the fruit of success (brute force works, why study anything else?), but also the result of a focus on performance above all else in the chess community. Also, chess has proved to be too challenging for many of the AI techniques that have been thrown at it. We wish to promote chess as the fundamental test bed recognized by our founding researchers and increase awareness of its contribution to date.