Black & White

The built-in philosophies in the games of chess and go

Courtesy of Wikimedia

Two of the crowning achievements in artificial intelligence’s rise to world dominance involved the elegant games of chess and go. The first step in the ladder was IBM’s Deep Blue victory over the legendary chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997. The next moment of triumph didn’t come for nearly another 10 years, when Google’s AlphaGo dominated over the world champion, Lee Sedol, 4 to 1.

Both of these games have somehow become a valuable marker of human capability, while simultaneously seen as a fringe marker of human awkwardness. Obsessing over little black and white pieces on a square board is an eccentric human quality that may seem an odd quirk. Yet, there is something fascinating about these games in their simplicity and complexity that give them a lasting legacy, serving as immense hurdles for testing intelligence, whether human or artificial.

Each of the games are built on beautifully simple rules. Each is contained within the space of a defined grid, have two players, and the pieces have defined moves that live or die on the board. It is a battle of the wits based on the fairest of conditions. Both sides have the same pieces, the same number of move, the same board. There is no luck involved. No shuffled deck of cards. No dice. It is pure skill and strategy that leads…