9 General Intelligence and Games in General

Let us return to the question of what intelligence actually is, the one I discussed in chapter 3 without coming to any satisfying conclusion. Since you are reading this, you clearly haven't given up on reading this book, but you may be a bit disappointed with me because I apparently can't give you a straight answer. Well, I was just being honest. It is still very much up for debate to what extent there exists such a thing as general intelligence. I won't try to force a particular view on you because I think there's plenty of work, both philosophical and empirical, left to do to understand this question better. What it seems we can all agree on, however, is that some artificial intelligence systems have broader applicability than others in the sense that they can perform a wider range of tasks and that it is a desirable quality of an AI system to be generic rather than specific. There is nothing wrong with AI systems that can do only one thing if we are simply trying to engineer a solution to a specific problem. If we are trying to make scientific progress on creating artificial intelligence, however, then it is important that we build systems that can do a range of different things—for example, play different games.