Organizational Poetics: The Game of Chess as a Modeling Technology in Soviet Computing

• In Event: Soviet Visions of Intelligence in the Light of Contemporary Socio-Technical Discourses

Abstract

Inspired by the chess-obsessed Euroamerican research community in the 1940s-1950s, early Soviet computing repeatedly emphasized chess as a domain for testing heuristic techniques through mostly brute-force methods. But by the 1960s, this project was supplemented by an earlier Soviet philosophy of games pursued through psychotechnical research. This socialist approach to modeling through games–led by world chess champion Mikhail Botvinnik and supported by Soviet luminaries such as Mikhail Shura-Bura, Vadim Trapeznikov, and Georg Klaus–saw in chess an experimental practice capable of modeling the complexities of socialist planning. In this talk, I will trace an alternative history of Soviet economic modeling that can help us to understand the relationship between technosciences and the design and play of games.

Author

• Samuel Pizelo, U of Toronto (Canada)