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Chess as the Drosophila of AI

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Computers, Chess, and Cognition

Abstract

The phrase Chess is the Drosophila of Artificial Intelligence is not my own invention. To the best of my recollection, I owe it to the late Alexander Kronrod, who may have used it as a defense against physicists when they complained that he used so much of their precious computer time in a mere chess match. This was probably in 1966 during the year-long computer chess telegraph match between Stanford University and the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics in Moscow. Let me say that initially my thoughts were not entirely clear when choosing this topic, but now I can expand the subject slightly so as to allow discussion of the Drosophila of AI (artificial intelligence) in a more general sense.

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  • An earlier version of this chapter, “The Fruitfly on the Fly,” appeared in the Journal of the International Computer Chess Association, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 199–206. We thank the editors of the Journal for permission to use their transcription of Professor McCarthy’s talk at the Canadian Information Processing Society Conference, Edmonton, 30 May 1989.

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© 1990 Springer-Verlag New York Inc.

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McCarthy, J. (1990). Chess as the Drosophila of AI. In: Marsland, T.A., Schaeffer, J. (eds) Computers, Chess, and Cognition. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-9080-0_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-9080-0_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4613-9082-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4613-9080-0

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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