AI, Chess, and Language 3.1: Search! What enables us to entertain the idea that chess is a paradigmatic case of cultural evolution?

John McCarthy – who, you may recall, coined the phrase “artificial intelligence” – has written a well-known article with the title, “Chess as the Drosophila of AI” (1990). In his introduction McCarthy notes:

One of the pressures I was under came from people in computer science. They sometimes urged me to tackle topics of practical importance and to concentrate on experimental and theoretical work in precisely these applicable areas, as opposed to a backwater such as computer chess. This echoes a remark that might have been made to Thomas Hunt Morgan in 1910: “Elephants ...