In many parts of the AI community, people are used to thinking about artificial intelligence as applied to new and modern forms of game theory. For example, some of the most tangible rollouts of AI products are in new digital games that incorporate MMORPG design.
But what about a game that’s centuries old, that evolved, in some ways, shoulder to shoulder with the concept of artificial intelligence itself?
Tamer Karatekin has a lot of chess experience, as a player and as a coach. In a recent TED talk, he went over some of the intersections between this ancient game and the very new practice of ceding ground to a new class of thinking machines.
Part of what’s really interesting about this talk is that it doesn’t just address the power of AI out of context. It takes something that’s historical, cultural and molded by provincial and regional customs, and talks about how our newest technologies have revolutionized the game itself.
A Look at Chess History
In a rich retelling of the story of chess, Karatekin introduces a series of new pieces that he himself designed, and also talks about pieces that have fallen out of fashion in contemporary chess culture.
He starts by talking about Shatranj as a precursor to chess, a Persian game brought to Europe through Andalusia and Sicily around the 10th century.
In Shatranj, some of the player characters are different. Karatekin also talks about the elephant, which is still in the chess terminology of many modern languages, but not English.
Throughout the presentation you can see Karatekin molding pieces to represent cultural iconography, and asking whether we can make chess diverse, inclusive and representative in the global age.
Whether it’s the evolution of the Queen piece as “damme” or the falcon or “sokoli” that’s a an icon of military power in Slavic languages, or Alexander the Great’s horse, Karatekin invokes historical examples as he talks about the potential of chess for community learning.
Quotes from the Talk:
“I was born in the Macedonian region of Yugoslavia, and learned chess from my grandfather playing with …(his) chess set. Growing up in Istanbul, I drew world chess champions … and became the Turkish national champion. While studying at MIT, I competed as the first board player on MIT’s chess team. Later, as a children’s chess coach, I helped my students earn international medals. I also taught at one of the world’s first schools to make chess compulsory, witnessing its transformative impact on education. During my classroom instruction there, I developed a chess platform for early childhood education to effectively blend classroom and home learning.”
“(Changes in) chess terminology … reflect fascinating phonetic and cultural transformations that few learners are aware of. Moreover, Chess has deep connections to art, literature, history, mathematics and AI that are rarely explored in the classroom. I’m inspired by these stories and intersections that deserve a prominent place in modern education.”
“Chess was a truly multicultural game in this golden age, but by the end of Age of Enlightenment, it became increasingly religionized, which contrasts with its role as a unifying global sport.”
“How can we separate church from chess for the multi-faith classroom? Should we modernize chess king and queen to move beyond their entrenched symbols of monarchy, and bring back gender-neutral terminology and designs? Can we fully acknowledge the global history of chess as an amalgamation of contributions from cultures worldwide?”
“Collaborate with us in building a new future for chess education and cultural connection. Teach at your institution with our nonprofits …. join our AI coding boot camps and explore how chess can inspire AI education. Use culturally and spiritually inclusive chess sets in the classroom, at tournaments and at home, to celebrate the cultural heritage and evolution of chess.”
AI Eclipses Human Capability
I’ll talk about this a little later in the timeline of artificial intelligence, but as you consider AI‘s impact on chess, you can see that it represents an early form of “human displacement,” where the machine simply gets better at the game than any human.
Karatekin gives an anecdote where Garry Kasparov, speaking at Northeastern University in Boston about losing his job to AI, suggested that after his chess retirement and loss to Deep Blue, he ended up working in restaurants.
That’s a powerful example of something that many of us are going to encounter rather soon – the idea that our skills, carefully cultivated over decades, are no longer needed in the ways that they once were.
Chess and AI
With that in mind, Karatekin spends quite a lot of time talking about the particular timeline from the middle of the 20th century, when AI became ascendant, to today, when we have very sophisticated AI systems in place.
But he also started out with the story of the mechanical Turk. If you’ve never heard of this, it was supposed to be an early example of an automaton chess player that flummoxed characters like Ben Franklin in the 1770s.
However, Karatekin reveals that the mechanical Turk was actually not an artificially intelligent machine, but rather a human hiding inside of a box.
Fast-forward to the middle of the 20th century, and Alan Turing pioneers the idea of creating a chess- playing digital intelligence.
Since then, we’ve seen a number of landmarks, including the aforementioned loss to Deep Blue in 1997, the debut of Alphazero and subsequent model improvements: such that today’s AI chess engines have ratings far above the best human players.
Karatekin also refers back to MIT many times, including referencing Rybka or “little fish” system developed by an MIT alumnus. Despite the eventual allegations leveled at Vasik Rajlich, Rybka remains a point on the timeline of AI chess emergence and design.
The bottom line, though, is that Karatekin suggests we can use chess as a learning tool for humans. We can integrate chess learning with understanding better how AI relates to game theory. And we can do it in a way that celebrates not just one, but multiple world cultures. It may be that this kind of cultural integration is going to soften the blow as AI waltzes into our lives in every way imaginable.
