On the Impact of Information Technologies on Society: an Historical Perspective through the Game of Chess

The game of chess has always been viewed as an iconic representation of intellectual prowess. Since the very beginning of computer science, the challenge of being able to program a computer capable of playing chess and beating humans has been alive and used both as a mark to measure hardware/software progresses and as an ongoing programming challenge leading to numerous discoveries. In the early days of computer science it was a topic for specialists. But as computers were democratized, and the strength of chess engines began to increase, chess players started to appropriate to themselves these new tools. We show how these interactions between the world of chess and information technologies have been herald of broader social impacts of information technologies. The game of chess, and more broadly the world of chess (chess players, literature, computer softwares and websites dedicated to chess, etc.), turns out to be a surprisingly and particularly sharp indicator of the changes induced in our everyday life by the information technologies. Moreover, in the same way that chess is a modelization of war that captures the raw features of strategic thinking, chess world can be seen as small society making the study of the information technologies impact easier to analyze and to grasp. Chess and computer science Alan Turing was born when the Turk automaton was finishing its more than a century long career of illusion. The Turk automaton was supposed to be a machine playing chess. Actually it was operated by a human hidden in it (it took many years for the hoax to be found). Last year the french chess federation suspended three titled players. They have been convicted of cheating using chess engines during the chess Olympiad that took place in Khanty-Mansiysk on September 2010. In a century tables have completely turned: nowadays it is the machine that is hidden within the player. Computer science, and more broadly information technologies, have changed the world so deeply, so quickly and so unexpectedly that it is difficult to grasp. Economists are fond of paradoxical indexes such as the Big-Mac index [PP03] (illustrating the purchasing-power parities among currencies) or the skyscraper index [And99] (a correlation between skyscraper building and economic crises) that underly strange and funny correlations between a priori unrelated phenomenons. In this paper we develop such an index by showing how the interactions between the world of chess and computer science turn out to be particularly illuminating regarding the societal impacts of information technologies. In the same way that chess is a metaphor of war, we advocate that the interplay between information technologies and the chess world can be 1Though it can be noted that in 1912 Leonardo Torres y Quevedo built a real machine that could play King and Rook versus King endgames. It is arguably the first real chess playing machine built in history. 268 A. Voronkov (ed.), Turing-100 (EPiC Series, vol. 10), pp. 268–277 Impact of IT on society through the game of chess Prost viewed as a metaphor of the more general issue of how information technologies and society have interacted together. Moreover, as we will show, it has not been exceptional for the chess world’s use of information technologies to precede mainstream uses. Thus, looking at today’s relations between the world of chess and information technologies could be telling for the future of our digitalized era. Finally, the world of chess is smaller than the real society. In the same way than chess captures the essence of strategic thinking in a concise and formalized way, the world of chess can be seen as a miniature version of society making it much easier to grasp and analyze. The game of chess has already been used as an index of the social, and geopolitical, situation of the world. In [Kas03] G. Kasparov shows how the best chess masters (and style of play) of every epoch have deep links with the most prominent ideas, and geopolitical conflicts. One of the first famous chess players was Ruy Lopez, a spanish priest of the 16th century. At the time Spain was dominating the world and was conquering the “new world”. Then came the Renaissance and not surprisingly one of the best players, Domenico Lorenzo Ponziani, was from Modena in Italy. The next century was the one of the philosophers of the enlightment and its blind beliefs in rationalism: the best player was of course a french, François-André Philidor, and his famous saying ’the pawns are the soul of chess’ was a clear announcement of the french revolution. The great rivalry between France and Great-Britain during the 18th and 19th centuries found an echo in the fights between french and britton players: La Bourdonnais vs Mc Donnell and Saint-Amand vs Staunton to cite but a few. The parallel between the world of chess and that of ideas and geopolitical standings has continued until today (with the more than famous match Fisher vs Spassky in the middle of the cold-war). It suffices to look at the reigning world champions to see that the world has changed: Viswanathan Anand comes from India and the women world champion, Hou Yifan, is Chinese. Chess as a tool to discover computer capacities The game of chess has been intimately related with computer science from the early beginnings of the latter. Indeed, the founding fathers of computer science, artificial intelligence and information theory, respectively Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon proposed programs and principles for chess programs in the early fifties. A time where computers were rather product of the minds than real objects. At the time the questions in computer science were very fundamental and theoretical. The computer was a new artefact and it was not clear at all at what it could be used for, and where its limits were, both from a theoretical and a practical point of view. It may seem paradoxical since a computer is a very elaborated machine, which has not been invented or found by serendipity. Nonetheless, once created its scope remained largely unknown. So one could wonder: how come someone built a very elaborated machine without precisely knowing what it would be used for? The short answer is that Turing machines were invented as a (negative) solution to the very fundamental question of the decidability of logic. The universal Turing machine was a by-product of a proof regarding a theorem about the foundations of mathematics. More precisely the question was to find a generic method to state whether any given mathematical formula is true or not, together with a proof of this. One could argue that there is nothing farther from a practical perspective than this fact. 2It has to be noted that Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, more than century ago, imagined that chess could be programmed using numbers to represent chess position in the analytical machine.