Computation, Chess, and Language in Artificial Intelligence

New working paper. Title above, links, abstract, contents and introduction below:

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/164885566/Computation_Chess_and_Language_in_Artificial_Intelligence
SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6319062
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/401355671_Computation_Chess_and_Language_in_Artificial_Intelligence

Abstract: This paper reexamines the foundations of artificial intelligence by contrasting chess and natural language as paradigmatic domains. Chess, long treated as a benchmark for intelligence, is finite, rule-governed, and geometrically well-defined. It lends itself naturally to symbolic search and evaluation. Natural language, by contrast, operates in an unbounded and geometrically complex reality. Its rules are open-ended, its objectives diffuse, and its domain inseparable from embodied experience. With chess as its premier case – McCarthy: “the Drosophila of AI,” – AI has been guided by a deeper assumption: that the first principles of intelligence reduce to the first principles of computation. Drawing on Miriam Yevick’s distinction between symbolic and neural computational regimes, I propose that intelligence must be understood as operating in a geometrically complex world under finite resource constraints. Embodiment is therefore a formal condition of intelligence, not an incidental feature. Recognizing the structural difference between bounded games and open-ended cognition clarifies both the historical trajectory of AI and the conceptual limits of current systems.

Contents

Introduction: Chess, Language, and Intelligence 3 
Chess and Language as Paradigmatic Cases for Artificial Intelligence 5 
Three Principles of Intelligence (That Aren't Principles of Computation) 12 
Chronology of Chess, Language, and AI 15

Introduction: Chess, Language, and Intelligence

Chess has been a central concern of AI from the beginning. AI researchers didn’t become interested in natural language until the 1970s. Before that computational research on natural language was the domain of computational linguistics (CL), which started with machine translation (of texts from one natural language to another) as its primary problem. Thus we have two different disciplines, AI and CL.

In a sense, AI was fundamentally a philosophical exercise. It was an attempt to demonstrate, in effect, that we could understand the human mind in terms of computation. But rather than advance its philosophical objective through argument, it chose computational demonstration as its mode of expression. Chess became a central concern for two reasons: 1) On the one hand it was widely regarded as exhibiting the pinnacle of human reasoning ability. If we could create a computer program to play a championship game of chess, we could create a computer program that would be capable of cognitive or even perceptual task humans can do. 2) But also, the nature of chess made it well-suited for computational investigation.

The article that opens this working paper – Chess and Language as Paradigmatic Cases for Artificial Intelligence – concentrates on this and then goes on to make the point that language is utterly unlike chess in this respect. The chess domain is bounded and well-defined. Natural language is not; it is ill-defined and unbounded.

That’s as far as I got in the article, but I had been aiming for an argument that AI is still, in effect, mesmerized by the chess paradigm. I didn’t make it that far because language is so obviously different from chess that it is difficult to see how anyone would made that mistake.

What I have come to realize, only after I’d finished the article, is that it isn’t so much chess that has mesmerized AI. Rather it is computation itself. AI has been implicitly assuming that the First Principles of intelligence reduce to the First Principles of Computing. The first principles of computing can be found in the work of Alan Turing (the abstract idea of computing) and and others.

The first principles of intelligence are more stringent. As Claude put it a recent dialog:

First principle of intelligence: Must operate in unbounded, geometrically complex physical reality with finite resources.

Those two qualifications, an unbounded, geometrically complex reality, and finite computational resources, change the nature of the problem considerably. I note, in passing, that this allows us to assign formal significance to the concept of embodiment, for it is embodiment that commits intelligence to operating with finite resources in a geometrically complex universe.

Miriam Yevick’s 1975 paper, “Holographic or Fourier Logic,” is the crucial document, but it’s been forgotten. Using identification in the visual domain as her case, she showed that, where we are dealing with geometrically simple objects, sequential symbolic processing is the most efficient computational regime. But when we are dealing with geometrically complex objects, neural net processing is the most efficient computational regime. AI started out with symbolic processing in the 1950s and arrived at neural nets in the 2010s. But it hasn’t explicitly recognized that one must fit the mode of processing to the nature of the world. In that (perhaps a bit peculiar) sense, the researchers in the currently-dominant paradigm don’t know what they’re doing.

The second article in this working paper, Three Principles of Intelligence (That Aren't Principles of Computation), discusses this in more detail. I had it generated by Claude 4.5 after a long series of dialogs over several days.

The last article is a chronology of events in the history of chess and language in AI.