Is chess the drosophila of artificial intelligence? A social history of an algorithm

2011 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Ensmenger
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Social History ◽  
Computer Games ◽  
Computer Software ◽  
Fruit Fly ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Genetics Research ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Experimental Technology

Since the mid 1960s, researchers in computer science have famously referred to chess as the ‘drosophila’ of artificial intelligence (AI). What they seem to mean by this is that chess, like the common fruit fly, is an accessible, familiar, and relatively simple experimental technology that nonetheless can be used productively to produce valid knowledge about other, more complex systems. But for historians of science and technology, the analogy between chess and drosophila assumes a larger significance. As Robert Kohler has ably described, the decision to adopt drosophila as the organism of choice for genetics research had far-reaching implications for the development of 20th century biology. In a similar manner, the decision to focus on chess as the measure of both human and computer intelligence had important and unintended consequences for AI research. This paper explores the emergence of chess as an experimental technology, its significance in the developing research practices of the AI community, and the unique ways in which the decision to focus on chess shaped the program of AI research in the decade of the 1970s. More broadly, it attempts to open up the virtual black box of computer software – and of computer games in particular – to the scrutiny of historical and sociological analysis.

The Origins of Unions: Some Miscellaneous Sydney Workers in 1910

1991 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-308
Author(s):  
Christopher Sheil
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Occupational Group ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Union Formation ◽  
Simple Fact ◽  
Common Assumption ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common

In considering the causes and possible corrections for the current decline in Australian trade union membership, it may help to reflect on the origins of the movement. This article presents evidence and an argument about one aspect of the origins of the Federated Miscellaneous Workers Union (FMWU). The evidence concerns the social history of watchmen, caretakers and cleaners, who formed the original core of the union's membership. The argument is that these workers amounted to such an improbable basis for a union that the simple fact of their organization represents a substantial challenge to the common assumption in labour history that it is the cohesion of an occupational group that empowers it. To the extent that the origins of the union are typical, it can be suggested that the period of tremendous Australian trade union formation and growth between 1907 and 1913 owed much more to general political and, by extertsion, social conditions than it did to the specific circumstances of any particular section of workers.

scholarly journals Semangat Reformasi Persembahan Umat Pasca Pembuangan Menurut Maleakhi 3:6-12

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 104
Author(s):  
Rudolf Panggabean
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
The Real ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common

The tithe offering to God shows the repentance of the people to Him. Obedience in giving a true tithe offering is a practice of covenant between God and His people, but n its implementation, people break their covenants against God's decree.  people still practice the wrong practices of worshipping God, especially regarding things. The real tithe is not of how much the people give to God, but rather a form of obedience to Him. This condition was conveyed by Malachi to the people of Israel. This study aims to analyze the text of Malachi 3:6-12 to gain an understanding of the spirit of reform of post-exile offerings. The method used in this study is qualitative by applying descriptive methods through the analysis of the social history of the text. In terms of the spirit of reform of the people after the exile according to the text of Malachi 4:6-12, it is obtained an understanding of the spirit of reform of the offering of the people as obedience through thanksgiving to God and to the common welfare.AbstrakPersembahan persepuluhan kepada Allah menunjukkan pertobatan umat kepada-Nya. Ketaatan dalam memberikan persembahan persepuluhan yang benar merupakan salah satu praktik perjanjian antara Allah dan umat-Nya, namun pada pelaksanaannya, umat melanggar perjanjian mereka terhadap ketetapan Allah itu. umat masih saja melakukan praktik peribadatan yang salah kepada Allah, khususnya mengenai persembahan perse-puluhan. Kondisi ini disampaikan Nabi Maleakhi kepada umat Israel. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menganalisa teks Maleakhi 3:6-12 untuk mendapatkan pemahaman semangat reformasi persembahan umat pasca pembuangan. Metode yang dipakai dalam penelitian ini adalah kualitatif, dengan menerapkan metode deskriptif melalui analisis sejarah sosial teks. Dalam hal semangat reformasi persmbahan umat pasca pembuangan  menurut teks Maleakhi 4:6-12, maka didapatkan pemahaman mengenai semangat reformasi persembahan umat sebagai ketaatan melalui ucapan syukur kepada Allah dan untuk kesejahteraan bersama

Curation as research. A case study in orphaned and underreported archaeological collections

2012 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara L. Voss
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Chinese Diaspora ◽  
Overseas Chinese ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Innovative Research ◽  
Archaeological Collections ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common

AbstractAs archaeologists grapple with the international curation crisis, new attention is being given to the problem of ‘orphaned’ archaeological collections and collections that are underanalysed and underreported. The common rationale for curating such collections is to restore research potential, but such efforts are met with frustration because of the difficulties of re-establishing provenance and quantitative control for artefacts long separated from their original archaeological context. Moreover, most archaeologists view curation as a process that manages, rather than investigates, archaeological collections. To the contrary, this article argues that accessioning, inventory, cataloguing, rehousing and conservation are not simply precursors to research, but rather meaningful generative encounters between scholars and objects. Examples from the curation of the Market Street Chinatown archaeological collection illustrate how the process of curation can generate innovative research undertakings. Because archaeological research on this collection cannot proceed in a typical way, the research developed through the curation process departs from archaeological conventions to bring new perspectives on the social history of the Overseas Chinese diaspora.

scholarly journals Honos alit artes. Studi per il settantesimo compleanno di Mario Ascheri. IV. L’età moderna e contemporanea

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Administration Of Justice ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
History Of Europe ◽  
The Relationship

The studies included in this volume analyze the legal and social history of Europe and North America by the end of the eighteenth century to the contemporary age. The study investigates the relationship between culture and legal status (science, law and government), the administration of justice and the transformation of the legal professions. That lights up the separation, in the whole complex of Western legal tradition, that identifies the countries of the common law.

Sergey Timofeyevich Konenkov’s Mythopoetics

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-65
Author(s):  
Elena I. Bulycheva
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
New World ◽  
European Origin ◽  
Soviet Art ◽  
Folk Traditions ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Process Characteristic ◽  
Ideological Context

The article deals with the features of mythopoetic models in S.T. Konenkov’s sculpture. Despite the fact that monographs, albums, dozens of articles are devoted to the maestro’s works and they are quite well studied, the nature of the mythologism of S.T. Konenkov’s artistic thinking has not been fully revealed. In the ideological context of Soviet art studies, which were based on the methodology of the “social history of art”, only the fact of the sculptor’s deep interest in archaic folk traditions was noted, while this topic can be considered as a natural manifestation of the myth-making process characteristic of the art of the 20th century as a whole. Using the example of S.T. Konenkov’s works, the article attempts to retrace the formation specifics of the “non-classical artistic language” of mythopoetics in the Russian land, which consisted in the fact that, unlike Western European artists who would immerse in the exotic world of archaic art of non-European origin (primarily Africa), Russian masters were fascinated by their home antiquity. When considering the mythological structures that served as the basis for the mythopoetic models of S.T. Konenkov’s sculptural projects, three basic groups can be conditionally distinguished: a direct appeal to ancient mythology, pagan Slavic reminiscences, and a mythological interpretation of a freshly created new world. It is thanks to myth-making that the characters of S.T. Konenkov’s sculptural compositions, despite all the heterogeneity of specific subjects, belong to the integrity of a single cosmos created by the mythopoetic consciousness of the maestro. At the same time, the common mythological foundations of the Russian sculpture development in that period determine the commonality of the mythopoetic models, characteristic not only of S.T. Konenkov’s works. In many ways, they are also quite clearly manifested in the works of S.D. Erzia, A.S. Golubkina, and others.

scholarly journals Cholera in Present-Day Haiti: Interpretations of and Responses to a Contemporary Enemy

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 94-110
Author(s):  
Melissa Frick
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Response Mechanism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common

Note: In lieu of an abstract, this is the article's first paragraph. "In his introduction to Epidemics and Ideas, Paul Slack calls to revive the study of social history of epidemics, wanting to show how societies cope with, react to, and interpret crises of disease. He reviews historian Richard Evans’ notion of the “common dramaturgy” to all epidemics, which states that human society responds to mass infection through an inherent response mechanism. Disease presents common dilemmas - including decisions on how the disease is transmitted, whom it infects, who is to blame, and incites common responses. Furthermore, Slack suggests that the society’s understanding of infection, interpreted through different social, cultural, and political contexts, shapes the specificity of these responses. Such variables of understanding include the novelty of the disease, violence of infection, geographical and social incidence, and the ‘disease-environment’ preceding the epidemic."

Review of The Countryside of Medieval England, by Grenville Astill and Annie Grant; The Common Fields of England, by Eric Kerridge; Historic Landscapes of Britain from the Air, by Robin Glasscock; The European City, by Leonardo Benevolo; Mission and Method: The Early-Nineteenth-Century French Public Health Movement, by Ann F. La Berge; Terra Cognita: The Mental Discovery of America, by Eviatar Zerubavel; Landscape and Material Life in Franklin County, Massachusetts, 1770-1860, by J. Ritchie Garrison; The Persistence of Ethnicity: Dutch Calvinist Pioneers in Amsterdam, Montana, by Rob Kroes; The Pennsylvania Barn: Its Origin, Evolution, and Distribution in North America, by Robert F. Ensminger; The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought, by James S. Romm; Salt and Civilization, by S. A. M. Adshead; Meleagrides: An Historical and Ethnogeographical Study of the Guinea Fowl, by Robin A. Donkin; War and the City, by G. J. Ashworth; Medicine and Charity before the Welfare State, by Jonathan Barry and Colin Jones; The Company Town: Architecture and Society in the Early Industrial Age, by John S. Garner; The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885-1945, by Henrika Kuklick; Policing and Decolonisation: Politics, Nationalism and the Police, 1917-65, by David M. Anderson and David Killingray; Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man's World, by Joseph Bristow; The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Post-Modern World, by Kevin Walsh; Community and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan: The Corporate Villages of Tokuchin-ho, by Hitomi Tonomura; Liquor and Labour in Southern Africa, by Jonathan Crush and Charles Ambler

1993 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-488
Author(s):  
Leonard Cantor ◽  
Della Hooke ◽  
Richard Lawton ◽  
Anthony Sutcliffe ◽  
Miles Ogborn ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Company Town ◽  
Medieval Japan ◽  
Industrial Age ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Public Health Movement ◽  
The City

The “Sonorous Summons” of the New History of Capitalism, Or, What Are We Talking about When We Talk about Economy?

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nan Enstad
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Main Path ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

The tale reads as a classic fall from grace. In the 1960s and 1970s, historians investigated the economy. They were serious and politically relevant. But then the discipline fell to the beguiling ways of cultural and social history. Fractured and fragmented, scholars wandered off like cats into various alleyways, pawed at incomprehensible theories, and lost track of the common reader. There is hope, however, because in the past decade or so a new movement has arisen to lead historians out of the obscure alleyways and back to the main path: the economy, so long neglected.

The Bodily Efficacy of the Categories

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-127
Author(s):  
Erhard Schüttpelz ◽  
Martin Zillinger
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Second Step ◽  
Common Denominator ◽  
Collective Consciousness ◽  
Success Stories ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Philosophical Project ◽  
Three Phases

Between 1900 and 1912, Durkheim, Mauss and other contributors of the L’Année Sociologique developed the most ambitious philosophical project of modern anthropology: a comparative and worldwide social history of philosophical categories. This article briefly summarises three phases of the ‘Category Project’ and gives a preliminary characterisation of its Hegelian ambitions. Further, it points out the common denominator in the diverse success stories of the Category Project, namely the reference to the human body as the site of collective consciousness. In a second step, the article traces the intricate genesis and after-life of the most important category of bodily efficacy and epistemological insight provided by Durkheim and Mauss: the elaboration of ‘effervescence’ and its manifestation of ‘totality’.

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