MAURICE DAUMAS PRIZE 2013	Share

ICOHTEC’s article prize, the Maurice Daumas Prize, has been awarded for the third time. 35 articles had been submitted for consideration. The committee decided to award the article “Is chess the drosophila of artificial intelligence? A social history of an algorithm” written by Nathan Ensmenger as this year’s winner of the Maurice Daumas Prize.
Nathan Ensmenger has been an Associate Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University in Bloomington since 2012. His article was published in the journal Social Studies of Science in 2012. 'Is chess the drosophila of artificial intelligence?' attempts to fit the algorithms developed to enable computers to play chess into a research paradigm defined by an organism used for genetics research in a way parallel to that developed by Robert Kohler for twentieth-century biology.

Nathan Ensmenger argues that the decision to focus on chess as a measure of both human and computer “intelligence” had important and unintended consequences for research into artificial intelligence (AI). The article is of high relevance to the history of technology in general and for the history of AI in particular. It deals with a core problem with which AI still struggles today: the imitation of human intelligence. Ensmenger shows how the decision to adopt chess as its drosophila led to a dead-end. He attempts to link an internal history of software with cultural history (chess) and to explain software as a cultural concept.

The Prize Committee consisted of Professor Susan Schmidt Horning, USA (chair), Dr. Andrew J. Butrica, USA, Hermione Giffard, Independent Scholar, The Netherlands, and Professor Pierre Lamard, France.

22 August 2013