The 'kind of processing agent' emphasis is a very good one, and I think worth bringing up in every one of these conversations. That said, I want to niggle a li

The 'kind of processing agent' emphasis is a very good one, and I think worth bringing up in every one of these conversations. That said, I want to niggle a little bit on some of these points There certainly does seem to be component re-use in certain parts of the brain between seemingly disparate tasks. The left brain/right brain divide has been largely debunked, and I'm not entirely sure what the current state of the art is, but I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that that re-use in this particular case (if it exists, I don't know) is anything other than a 'best approximation' (and maybe not even best) with the available hardware. Like using a fork to eat soup. Sure you can kinda do it, but you're always gonna be thinner than the fellow with the spoon. That suggests to me then that using games as a metric of intelligence is actually a pretty poor way of getting at the deeper issue; there are too many other variables beyond "how much (general/amalgamated) smarts have you got?". It might be semi-convenient when you have cause to believe that the two models you're testing have largely similar structure (i.e., two humans), but it gets pretty noisy when you've got a less than solid idea how similar the two models are. Because there is an obvious, perfect solution to the problem, you end up with a kind of algorithmic continuum, with the system you're trying to model on one end and perfect brute force on the other. And you don't know how far along the continuum your model is; it might be pretty close to the system (the brain), in which case, hey! Progress. But it might be closer to the perfect solution, and thus closer to dedicated hardware for the problem at hand, instead of adapted hardware doing its best. It might have a spork, which makes it rather less worthy of admiration when it comes to soup-eating. Especially when you see it struggle with the steak. So, in short; I think it actually -might- be a sign that strategy has secretly been easier this whole time. I'm not even sure it's that much of a secret. At least when it comes to the particular processing agents in question, the ones capable of general intelligence as we understand it. If you want to get into philosophical conversations about Hyperintelligent Shades of Blue, well, that's another story.