Comment by kazinator
6 years ago
> Time spent on one is time not spent on the other.
But from the AI researcher's view, "the other" doesn't require time; someone else is advancing the hardware, which is outside of the AI researcher's area. The general method to-be-run on better hardware is known today; it doesn't have to be researched. So should the AI researcher just twiddle their thumbs, waiting for the hardware to improve?
In games like chess, it has long been known that if you have a big enough database, an optimal game can be played. For each board configuration, the entry in the database supplies the optimal move.
So according to the reasoning in this article, we shouldn't bother looking for improving chess. The hardware will eventually get enough storage that we can store all the moves, and fast enough that we can compute them all to populate the table. Then twenty lines of Javascript doing hashed lookup of chess boards with a giant Redis back end will be the grandmaster. :)
I think the author would agree with you, that improving chess-playing is not likely to be a productive domain for advancing AI in future, and for essentially the reasons you give here: it is too formal (this guess is based, in part, on some of the authors' other writing.)