12 March 2021

Diego Rasskin-Gutman - Collected Quotes

"A chess hypothesis is basically the equivalent to drawing up a strategic plan. Experimentation in chess is equivalent to the moves that are found to carry out each plan. Throughout the history of chess, both the plans (the hypotheses) as well as the moves (the experiments) have been evolving (thanks to results from the practice of the game and from analyses), and this knowledge is the patrimony of professional players." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"A second class of metaphors - mathematical algorithms, heuristics, and models - brings us closer to the world of computer science programs, simulations, and approximations of the brain and its cognitive processes." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"An algorithm refers to a successive and finite procedure by which it is possible to solve a certain problem. Algorithms are the operational base for most computer programs. They consist of a series of instructions that, thanks to programmers’ prior knowledge about the essential characteristics of a problem that must be solved, allow a step-by-step path to the solution." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"Any scientific hypothesis springs from knowledge that was previously generated by observations of facts in the real world. In addition, hypotheses produce predictions that need to be tested. For some, scientific definitions are limited to natural phenomena (although this definition would require mathematics to stop being a science since it deals with ideal objects)." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"As art, chess speaks to us of the personal decisions that are made in the course of a game. Looking at this facet of the game, the essential protagonist is the aesthetic sense rather than the capacity for calculation, which thus moves us closer to the human dimension and farther from mathematical algorithms." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"Chess, as a game of zero sum and total information is, theoretically, a game that can be solved. The problem is the immensity of the search tree: the total number of positions surpasses the number of atoms in our galaxy. When there are few pieces on the board, the search space is greatly reduced, and the problem becomes trivial for computers’ calculation capacity." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"Chess also offers a modality that includes an exercise of totally free creation - compositions. These artificial positions are created for didactic reasons to illustrate a certain subject or to propose a problem that has to be solved following a series of indications" (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"Chess is human communication. Each player, in each move, must understand the opponent’s message or soon fall into difficulties. In this way, the creative act is united with the capacity to understand the opponent’s intentions, resulting in a fight of ideas, wills, and creative imagination." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"Cognitive psychology has followed a different direction, considering intelligence as a set of mental representations and a series of processes that operate on these representations that allows the individual to adapt to the changing conditions of the environment. This type of approach is connected with information theory. The intelligent mind operates by processing information that it collects from the environment, and the better and faster this information is processed, the more intelligence is demonstrated." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"Finally, chess has a science - like special attraction since it lets the player first propose hypotheses of different strategic plans that are based on the game rules and possible moves of the pieces and then refute those hypotheses after careful investigation of the different lines of play. This process is analogous to the everyday work of a scientist." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"From its mystical origins as a dialogue with the supernatural powers to a metaphor for war, chess passes through a period as a representation of order in the universe until it becomes the game-art-science that millions of people all over the world are passionate about and that has developed into a testing ground for the sciences of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"Game theory postulates rational behavior for each participant. Each player is conscious of the rules and behaves in accordance with them, each player has sufficient knowledge of the situation in which he or she is involved to be able to evaluate what the best option is when it comes to taking action (a move), and each player takes into account the decisions that might be made by other participants and their repercussions with respect to his or her own decision. Game theory about zero-sum games with two participants is relevant for chess. In this type of situation, each action that is favorable to one participant (player) is proportionally unfavorable for the opponent. Thus, the gain of one represents the loss of the other." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"Game theory proposes a method called minimization-maximization (minimax) that determines the best possibility that is available to a player by following a decision tree that minimizes the opponent’s gain and maximizes the player’s own. This important algorithm is the basis for generating algorithms for chess programs." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"If intelligence is a capacity that is gradually acquired as a result of development and learning, then a machine that can learn from experience would have, at least in theory, the capacity to carry out intelligent behavior. [...] Humans have created machines that imitate us - that provide mirrors to see ourselves and measure our strength, our intellect, and even our creativity." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"In emergent processes, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. A mathematical phenomenon that appears in certain dynamic systems also occurs within biological systems, from molecular interactions within the cells to the cognitive processes that we use to move within society. [...] Emergent patterns of ideas, beauty, desires, or tragicomedy wait, ready to trap the next traveler in their complex domain of neatly patterned squares - the never-ending world of chess metaphors." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"In fact, H [entropy] measures the amount of uncertainty that exists in the phenomenon. If there were only one event, its probability would be equal to 1, and H would be equal to 0 - that is, there is no uncertainty about what will happen in a phenomenon with a single event because we always know what is going to occur. The more events that a phenomenon possesses, the more uncertainty there is about the state of the phenomenon. In other words, the more entropy, the more information." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"Many terms that are used to comment on games are aesthetic allusions, indicating that among chess players it is hard to separate out the game’s creative and analytic aspects. Terms that are frequently used include subtlety, depth, beauty, surprise, vision, brilliance, elegance, harmony, and symmetry." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"On the surface, chess is a game that has a winner and a loser. However, a deeper look reveals that perhaps chess is not just a game but a line of communication between two brains. [...] chess is a communication device. As with any other act of communication, it is necessary to have someone who sends the message, a transmission medium, and someone who receives the message. Players are both the communicators and receivers; the board and the chess pieces are the transmission medium. In an exchange of messages, ideas, attitudes, and personal positions about the uncertainty of our world, however, where is the win, and where is the loss?" (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"Pattern perception (that is, the perception of similarities in spatial or temporal configurations) has a fundamental role in playing chess [...] The two essential components in decision making in chess are recognizing patterns stored in long-term memory (which requires an exhaustive knowledge database) and searching for a solution within the problem space. The first component uses perception and long-term memory, and the second leans mainly on the calculation of variations, which in turn has its foundations in logical reasoning." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"The brain and its cognitive mental processes are the biological foundation for creating metaphors about the world and oneself. Artificial intelligence, human beings’ attempt to transcend their biology, tries to enter into these scenarios to learn how they function. But there is another metaphor of the world that has its own particular landscapes, inhabitants, and laws. The brain provides the organic structure that is necessary for generating the mind, which in turn is considered a process that results from brain activity." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"The master of chess is deeply familiar with these patterns and knows very well the position that would be beneficial to reach. The rest is thinking in a logical way (calculating) about how each piece should be moved to reach the new pattern that has already taken shape in the chess player’s mind. This way of facing chess is closely related to the solving of theorems in mathematics. For example, a mathematician who wishes to prove an equation needs to imagine how the terms on each side of the equal sign can be manipulated so that one is reduced to the other. The enterprise is far from easy, to judge by the more than two hundred years that have been needed to solve theorems such as that of Fermat (z^n = x^n + y^n), using diverse tricks to prove the equation." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"The mind creates a metaphor of ourselves and of the world that surrounds us. And it is so skillful that it has created machines that are capable of simulating human beings’ own creativity in a series of 1s and 0s [...]" (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"The complexities of the universe are reflected in the complexities of our brains and in that natural, intimate and solitary activity that we call mind. In this process of matching up and representing, the inexhaustible human curiosity accepts the ancestral challenge of exploring the enormity of what we have yet to know. Chess, a world of fixed rules but with almost infinite borders, is an approachable model of that profound and endless human search." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"The problem of identifying the subset of good moves is much more complicated than simply counting the total number of possibilities and falls completely into the domain of strategy and tactics of chess as a game." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"The simplest basic architecture of an artificial neural network is composed of three layers of neurons - input, output, and intermediary (historically called perceptron). When the input layer is stimulated, each node responds in a particular way by sending information to the intermediary level nodes, which in turn distribute it to the output layer nodes and thereby generate a response. The key to artificial neural networks is in the ways that the nodes are connected and how each node reacts to the stimuli coming from the nodes it is connected to. Just as with the architecture of the brain, the nodes allow information to pass only if a specific stimulus threshold is passed. This threshold is governed by a mathematical equation that can take different forms. The response depends on the sum of the stimuli coming from the input node connections and is 'all or nothing'." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"Vision is a capacity to understand a position and to generate solid strategic plans. And a good base of chess knowledge is needed to understand what it means to play with brilliance or elegance." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"With Kurt Gödel, we fi nd in the twentieth century the idea that formal systems are incomplete, a concept that is perhaps important to chess theory. If undecidable statements exist in chess, then it is impossible to solve them completely with a computer chess program." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

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