"The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder." (Adam Smith, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments", 1759)
"The chess board is the world, the pieces are the
phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of
Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play
is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never
overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance." (Thomas H Huxley, "A Liberal Education", 1868)
"Chess represents a contest between two forces, and consequently the general principles which govern a battle in its widest significance, are also applicable to the game of Chess." (Dr. Max Euwe, "Strategy & Tactices in chess", 1937)
"Game theory applies to a very different type of conflict, now technically called a game. The well-known games such as poker, chess, ticktacktoe and so forth are games in the strict technical Bark and counterbark sense. But what makes parlor games is not their entertainment value or detachment from real life." (Anatol Rapoport, "The Use and Misuse of Game Theory", Scientific American 207, 1962)
"Artificial intelligence is based on the assumption that the mind can be described as some kind of formal system manipulating symbols that stand for things in the world. Thus it doesn't matter what the brain is made of, or what it uses for tokens in the great game of thinking. Using an equivalent set of tokens and rules, we can do thinking with a digital computer, just as we can play chess using cups, salt and pepper shakers, knives, forks, and spoons. Using the right software, one system (the mind) can be mapped onto the other (the computer)." (George Johnson, Machinery of the Mind: Inside the New Science of Artificial Intelligence, 1986)
"An internal model allows a system to look ahead to the future consequences of current actions, without actually committing itself to those actions. In particular, the system can avoid acts that would set it irretrievably down some road to future disaster ('stepping off a cliff'). Less dramatically, but equally important, the model enables the agent to make current 'stage-setting' moves that set up later moves that are obviously advantageous. The very essence of a competitive advantage, whether it be in chess or economics, is the discovery and execution of stage-setting moves." (John H Holland, 1992)
"Visual thinking is often driven more strongly by the conceptual knowledge we use to organize our images than by the contents of the images themselves. Chess masters are known for their remarkable memory for the pieces on a chessboard. But it's not because people with photographic memories become chess masters. The masters are no better than beginners when remembering a board of randomly arranged pieces. Their memory captures meaningful relations among the pieces, such as threats and defenses, not just their distribution in space."(Steven Pinker, "How the Mind Works", 1997)
"A formal system consists of a number of tokens or symbols, like pieces in a game. These symbols can be combined into patterns by means of a set of rules which defines what is or is not permissible (e.g. the rules of chess). These rules are strictly formal, i.e. they conform to a precise logic. The configuration of the symbols at any specific moment constitutes a ‘state’ of the system. A specific state will activate the applicable rules which then transform the system from one state to another. If the set of rules governing the behaviour of the system are exact and complete, one could test whether various possible states of the system are or are not permissible." (Paul Cilliers, "Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems", 1998)
"So everyone has and uses mental representations. What sets expert performers apart from everyone else is the quality and quantity of their mental representations. Through years of practice, they develop highly complex and sophisticated representations of the various situations they are likely to encounter in their fields - such as the vast number of arrangements of chess pieces that can appear during games. These representations allow them to make faster, more accurate decisions and respond more quickly and effectively in a given situation. This, more than anything else, explains the difference in performance between novices and experts." (Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool," "Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise" , 2016)
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