Serious game? What are your criteria for you to consider a game to be serious?
A few interesting questions arose...
1) How long until a computer plays so well that a human can never beat it again? (5 years was my guess). Already here my friend.
2) Will computers give credence to Bobby Fischer's lament that "chess is played out", due to the steadily increasing % of grandmaster draws, based in part on computer-proven weak lines which have been pruned from the chess tree? "Maybe" for the top players in the world this matters, but for the rest of us? It doesnt.
3) Is it fair to use how computer-like or engine-matched a human player's moves are in a tournament setting as evidence of their cheating? (This would seem to me to violate the freedom to choose inherent in chess, which just might align with top engine move picks, however improbable.) Cheating is going to happen, no matter how well you try and stop it.
4) If we get quantum computers and chess is one day "solved" as was checkers, will perfect play for both sides result in an automatic draw being agreed? (This seems likely to me, as forming a mating net is way too complicated not to be foiled by perfect play by Black.) Never understood the concern about chess being solved. No human can play perfectly, or even at a chess engine level. Let chess be solved today. How is that going to impact us? Its not.
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Is there a running competition of chess programs? Like a never ending tournament?
There are several rating lists. One is:
http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/
Also, a periodic tournament is the TCEC:
If you pit computers against one another, you will either have a program that never loses as black, or always wins as white, correct? As white, computers should always play risky for the win, and as black, cautious to avoid a loss.
Now youre trying to include human factors like "risky" and "cautious"
Engines dont factor those things into moves. They dont even know what they are.
Coach_Leo: "So maybe instead of "creating consciousness", we would be constructing complex adaptive networks through which consciousness can viscerally experience an energetic environment. Not sure my distinction is real or purely semantic. But if we don't assume we're trying to create consciousness, then we simplify our task. We merely need to construct sufficiently complex intelligent devices :-) "
Yes it all gets question-begging quite quickly. It may be that emergent systems could produce consciousness -- though I think it's generally held that this cannot be only a program held on a digital computer. There has to be a world-mind boundary for consciousness to meaningfully occur. I think there are even proofs via Godel that sheer algorithmic complexity and processor speed alone could never create consciousness.
But that said, said ingredients may be necessary if not sufficient components of our experiments with building it. Also: I don't doubt pure digital computers will be able to simulate consciousness, i.e., pass a Turing Test, for conversational ability with most humans some time in the next century. But this sort of simulation still does not speak to pleasure/pain, emotion/discursive thought, i.e. "knowing that you know".
In fact I may have overstated that because without actual physicality a computer will not be able to talk sensibly about greather things, like politics or philosophy or literature or art -- except in a creepy preprogrammed way, perhaps.
Yeah if you make all of matter conscious the problem kind of goes away, but I'm not sure one can say a chair is conscious the way you or I are, just at a lower level. At least this suffers from a fasifiability issue. Further, where it's clear from studying the brains neuronal net that there is a structure that can permit vast interconnections and loops, it's not clear how the molecules in a chair show something similar -- at least yet.
My guess is some sort of biologically unsophisticated life could be fused with high-end digital AI to produce something conscious -- perhaps -- but it's highly unlikely it would be anything quite like us.