Claude Shannon's 1950 paper Programming a Computer for Playing Chess was a seminal work in the field of Artificial Intelligence, specifically in the area of algorithmic decision-making for adversarial games. In this paper, Shannon employs the Minimax Algorithm, which takes as its premise that your opponent will always choose the move that is best for them, and worst for you. This fundamentally adversarial premise is the same premise that leads to dynamics like tragedies of the commons, arms races, and mutually assured destruction.
Adversarial Games and the Minimax Algorithm are considered foundational concepts in Artificial Intelligence courses at universities around the world. By teaching the primacy of adversarial algorithms to computer science students for decades, have we unwittingly been proliferating adversarial worldviews in our society and in the code that increasingly shapes it? Adversarial paradigms of computation can be found in a number of areas. Social media platforms with advertising-based business models try to maximize user time-on-site, while many users try to minimize their own time-on-site. Institutional investors try to asymmetrically maximize their returns during bear markets. Militaries tend to be interested in domination, not cooperation.
The Unimax Algorithm is a cooperative game-playing alternative to the Minimax Algorithm. The underlying premise of Unimax is that computation should facilitate the collective flourishing of all beings. In the context of chess, this means that each player is trying to avoid capturing the opponent's pieces and trying to avoid restricting future movement. The result is that this game of combat, capture, and control is transformed into a beautiful, cooperative dance where each move is a gift of creating space.
I invite you to watch this traditionally adversarial game being played under a paradigm of collective flourishing. I hope that witnessing this conjures other areas of life that are traditionally adversarial and that we unquestioningly perpetuate. And I hope it prompts your imagination on how different our movements in the world might look if we approach them from a different perspective.