Advanced chess players require a society which produces enough surplus to afford enough leisure to allow someone to not only produce a brain not damaged by starvation, but to allow them to use that brain to learn chess at a high level. It took a very long time for humans to get to that level, even though chess is a fairly old game.

My point is, humans "in the wild" likely didn't have any equivalent to chess, because they didn't have sufficient leisure time. Chess is a product of an environment that's just as "artificial" as the one which produced cell phones.

Games, including complex ones, go back a long way in human history. I've seen various claims about how much free time people have in primitive societies and I don't know enough to really know which are correct. The modern style of chess play relies on having openings books and computer assistance, but that's less true of go, which AIUI is learned largely through practice and a cultivation of taste and instinct (and the pieces can just be a set of stones and a grid scratched in the dirt).

Games may have existed, but the relative skill level of the players was likely a lot lower when people weren't spending as much time mastering the game, spreading and consuming strategy knowledge, and constantly holding events to compete and refine the best players.

I think the entire analogy is stretched a little thin of the players requiring all of this, but I also think the original attack on the Go AI based on it's mass is off base as well.

But you have to admit that it's easier to learn fuseki when you don't have to worry about being eaten by a tiger.

remember that chess is a war game and that war is most often fought over resources and territory, so they had their "chess" alright.

The story of Chess, according to Iranian mythological sources (recounted in Shahnameh) is that it was presented to the Iranian Court by the emissaries of the Indian Court, as a 'semantic puzzle' invented by Indian sages. (These games, it should be noted, were pedagogical in nature and used as symbolic means of training monarchs by the intellectual elites.)

The response of the Iranian sages was the invention of Backgammon, to highlight the role of Providence in human affairs.

[p.s. not all Iranians are willing to cede Chess to the sister civilization of India: http://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Sport/chess.htm] ;)

The origin is unclear. The fact that the thematic of a game of war is prevailing now, to me means that it might have as well been in the beginning. Actually it shows at least that those semantics are relevant to war, and to live, so what I was saying stands.

Of course it involves war, but note how they teach the young prince it is (a) better to let the Vazier (your Queen) do all the heavy duty lifting, and (b) it is perfectly honorable to hide behind fortifications in a castle.

* to life

The self-repair and self-replicate come at a very hard cost, in the sense that it requires food, water and oxygen, while machines only need electricity. And the replication is actually incomplete in the sense that it starts in a very small state where it needs the three resources to actually become a complete human (adult) and dies if not taken care by a third-party in such early state (parents).

Plus, not far away in the future we will be able to connect an smartphone to a 3D circuit printer and print a new one, to achieve 'self-replication'