Games and the Rise of Systems Thinking: From Models to Machines

This article examines the historical development of systems thinking to demonstrate the manifold applications of games in modeling new understandings of systems. Chess and go were deliberately reconfigured by competitors, theorists, and tournament organizers over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into systematic totalities. This transformation profoundly influenced subsequent concepts of formal and symbolic systems developed in twentieth-century mathematics, AI research, cognitive science, and economics.