Some weeks ago I went through a very insightful book about the red queen hypothesis: the evolutionary arms race between coexisting species, or between different gender in the same species, or finally, between individual in the same gender competing for offspring.One classical example of the first one is the coevolution between figs and wasps: each fig having more or less a single dedicated wasp able to fertilize it. Those two coexisting species evolved through mutual competition: like inhabitants of the wonderland, they cannot stand still and are forced to continuously evolve in a perpetual arms race.
I want to now make the bold claim that the red queen hypothesis does not hold true only in the context of biological evolution, but in all cases in which there is competition and possibility of change. I would like to exemplify this bold claim on the amazing story of chess engines.
This is a community known the mosts only through the fame of the mythological Deep Blue, the first chess computer to defeat a human World Champion, the acclaimed Gary Kasparov.
I make this choice as it happens that I am active in the chess programming community since some years. Having been a mediocre club chess player in my youth, I have always been fascinated with chess engines and artificial intelligence. This even determined some of my career choices.
This will be a weird reading for people that never heard of chess tournaments or chess programming. You will get to know a competitive environment pushed forward by both by financial interests and the desire for intellectual prestige.
As a bonus, you are going to learn something about one the longest lived and most united communities in the digital world, the one of chess enthusiasts and programmers. To quote the motto of the World Chess Federation: Gens Una Sumus. We are one people.
I would like to start my journey with Gödel, Escher, Bach, an eternal Golder Braid, the gorgeous book by D. Hofstadter about everything, including artificial intelligence. There is one place in the middle of the book, where Hofstadter, a leading cognitive scientists of that time, starts to write about chess and chess computers. He is skeptical about the possibility that a computer program could defeat a human chess master (reddit link), adding that this is probably due to the peculiar way in which chess masters think. This was 1979. The AI scientists of that time seemed to predict a long hard time for chess computers. Obviously, if one is to negate such a development, this means that the development is already in course. There is a reward, financial gain and intellectual prestige, and there is a possibility to change, the computer technology rapidly evolving in those years.
Enter The Red Queen.
