 Why would a psychologist be a better programmer than a scientist in response to the WBM having picked a psychologist over a scientist for a programming job?
Silently, so as not to shock anyone with illusions about well dressed young women, Sandra Lea Grayling cursed the day she had persuaded the Chicago Space Mirror that there would be all sorts of human interest stories to be picked up at the first international grandmaster chess tournament in which an electronic computing machine was entered. That Siamese-twin clocks should be essential to a chess tournament struck Sandra as a particularly maddening circumstance. Her last assignment had been to interview the pilot pair riding the first American manned circum-lunar satellite—and the five alternate pairs who hadn't made the flight. Samples: "They say the Machine has been programmed to play nothing but pure Barcza System and Indian Defenses—and the Dragon Formation if anyone pushes the King Pawn." Sandra's chief difficulty was that she knew absolutely nothing about the game of chess—a point that she had slid over in conferring with the powers at the Space Mirror , but that now had begun to weigh on her. It is a game for lunatics—or else it creates them. What the Machine can do is examine all the likely lines of play for about eight moves ahead—that is, four moves each for White and Black—and then decide which is the best move on the basis of capturing enemy pieces, working toward checkmate, establishing a powerful central position and so on." In crucial situations, say where there's a chance of winning at once by trapping the enemy king, he examines many more moves ahead than that—thirty or forty even. The Machine is probably programmed to recognize such situations and do something of the same sort, though we can't be sure from the information World Business Machines has released. The equivalent of those in the Machine is the directions fed into it before it plays a game." The programming is the crux of the problem of the chess-playing computer. The first practical model, reported by Bernstein and Roberts of IBM in 1958 and which looked four moves ahead, was programmed so that it had a greedy worried tendency to grab at enemy pieces and to retreat its own whenever they were attacked. Flesh-and-blood chess masters have lost games by blunders they could have avoided by looking only one or two moves ahead. Once again, you see, you have the human factor, in this case working for the Machine." I have challenged it also to a few games of rapid-transit—an offer no true grandmaster would dare ignore. Chess players would say that the Machine has a very slow sight of the board.
 A psychologist could better predict a person's thinking during a chess game than a scientist could.
 A psychologist would know how to program a chess game to avoid cheating.  A psychologist can easily learn programming and has the background to be more effective at it than a scientist.  A psychologist knows the rules of chess more than a scientist does.  A psychologist could better predict a person's thinking during a chess game than a scientist could.