AI researchers use games because they're a tractable problem with clearly quantified metrics of success. It's not to win the game but to advance the field. Some

AI researchers use games because they're a tractable problem with clearly quantified metrics of success. It's not to win the game but to advance the field. Sometimes it might be just to publish a paper and seem cool, but every game that falls to AI feels like a step closer to AGI, or at least to better self-driving cars and other simpler kinds of AI.