[groestl]

Also, there is no reason to believe that playing chess in our head is anything else but us pattern matching a mental process on a higher level, recognizing a simulation there, and feeding that info back into the loop below. Nature provided us with a complex, layered and circular architecture of the brain, but the rest is pretty much training that structure. And we know that different architectures with similar outcome are possible, since there are vast variations across our own species, and other species as well, with essentially the same capabilities.