Flies vs Bobby Fisher
The skills of chess playing are unlikely to be sufficient for a fully competent human
- Several systems solve chess problems with world-class success but few can walk across a crowded room on two legs
- Modeling a fly landing on the ceiling vs modeling thought processes of scientists
- Solving the problems of chess playing is unlikely to lead to solutions for basic perceptual/motor competence
Notes:
Perhaps parochial to view chess playing and similar activities as the most important aspects of human achievement.
Probably incorrect to assume that solution of problems like chess playing will automatically lead to solution of such problems as speech recognition, spatial navigation, sensory-motor coordination and balance, recognition of objects, path planning, obstacle avoidance, learning from experience, selective attention, anticipation, and effective response to changing environmental conditions.
There is no reason to believe that modeling a fly landing on a ceiling should be intrinsically more difficult than modeling the thought processes of a scientist.
Differences in our ability to address these two problems are more likely to be due to differences in effort allocated and in the mechanisms exploited for their solution than to differences in the difficulty of the problems.