Chess Programs as Models of War Planning

Chess has been seen as a game based on war, and chess programs have been used for decades to demonstrate the power of computers and "artificial intelligence".

Each side has sixteen pieces and each has a very limited number of discrete moves at any time. Say a player has 30 possible moves at each turn. Then (order of magnitude) a move and response involves some 900 possibilities. A game may last 30, 40 or even more moves. Thinking five moves ahead would then involve considering specific possibilities out of a total of about 10,000,000,000,000. For even the fastest computers, complete enumeration is not possible.

As actually played, the game is still more complex. Each player has only a limited amount of time for the game, and is thus required to allocate time effectively so that more time is available to think about more difficult or complex move combinations.

Note especially that one sometimes sees chess masters playing a large number of games simultaneously, and indeed winning the large majority against a crowd of strong players. In that role, the master must allocate attention among many games so as not to keep each other opponent from waiting too long between moves.

Computer programs that successfully challenge human players not only have stored opening gambits of standard moves and their responses, but also have heuristic rules for generating moves to be considered, and heuristic rules for evaluating positions. The programs modify the weight attached to these rules according to the stage of the game.

Thus, although games always end in wins, losses or ties for each player, the computer programs only really focus on attaining winning positions or avoiding losing positions in the very end of their analysis. Most of the time the computer programs are involved in balancing large numbers of objectives, developing moves that advance one or more of those objectives, and evaluating likely positions against that array of changing objectives.

Like chess, opponents in wars act independently, and one's opponent seeks moves that counter one's intentions. Unlike chess, when one decides on a move, the result is not deterministically but only statistically related to ones decisions. Things seldom go just as planned. Moreover, the fog of war keeps one from always knowing immediately the response of the opponent to one's move. Thus, like chess playing programs, it seems to me that strategy and tactics in war must deal with large numbers of objectives, with the balance among them changing continually. Unlike chess, there are many more alternatives possible for each protagonist, often more than two protagonists, and much more uncertainty between decision and result.

Like a chess master playing many simultaneous games of chess, a national war leader is involved not only in one conflict, but in many theaters simultaneously. These include domestic policy, political policy, and many arenas of foreign policy. The leader's attention must be distributed among the plans for all of these in order to make timely decisions in each. Unlike the chess master, the many theaters of action are all interrelated. Thus failure in war will affect domestic policy, politics, and foreign policy in other arenas.

Iraq policy is now very complex. There are many factions within Iraq, and many external forces supporting one or another of the Iraqi factions. The strategy and tactics in the war in Iraq are themselves complex, shrouded in uncertainty, and influenced by inventive opponents. But they are vastly complicated by the overall problems in the Gulf, in the Middle East, in international economic policy, in the effort to contain and end international terrorism, and in the need to work on global systems problems such as global warming, not to mention domestic U.S. policy.

So is the goal in Iraq oil, or stability in the Gulf, or stability in Central Asia, or amelioration of the treats to Israel and the Middle East, or democracy, or combating international terrorism, or still other objectives? Tha answer is, I hope, "yes".

There is a saying. "When you want to get out of a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging." True, but I would note that when you have been digging a hole deeper and deeper for years, it may not be all that simple to get out once you have "stopped digging". When you are deep enough, you have to worry about the walls caving in on you as you try to escape. If you don't want to be in a hole, it is probably best not to start digging in the first place!