BOXES: An experiment in adaptive control

BOXES is the name of a computer program. This is what the chess player does when he lumps together large numbers of positions as being'similar' to each other, by neglecting the strategically irrelevant features in which they differ. The resultant small game can be said to be a'model' of the large game. To give a brutally extreme example, consider a specification of chess positions so incomplete as to map from the viewpoint of White the approximately 1050 positions of the large game on to the seven shown in Figure 1. Even this simple classification may have a role in the learning of chess.