>> The Lighthill Debates on AI specifically talk about why playing games well
doesn't really prove anything.

For a bit of context, that is a televised debate between Sir James Lighthill,
comissioned by the UK government to write a report (the "Lighthill Report") on
the state of AI research, on the one side, and John McCarthy [1], Donald Michie
[2] and Richard Gregory [3], on the other side. The Lighthill Report is widely
considered to be a principal cause of the first AI winter, of the 1970's, which
killed AI research dead for a good decade or so (until the next winter, of the
1980's). The debate at that point was basically just for show as Lighthill had
already submitted his report.

Now, I don't know which part of the televised debate you mean when you say that
[the debate] talks about why playing games well doesn't really prove anything,
but that sounds very much like Lighthill's opinion. On the other side, we have
Donald Michie, of course, creator of MENACE [4], the first reinforcement learning
system that played tic-tac-toe and was built out of matchboxes [5] [6].
Reinforcement learning is, of course, considered important today.

John McCarthy himself was critical of AI game playing research, particularly on
chess. In his response to the Lighthill report [7], he has this to say:

Lighthill had his shot at AI and missed [8], but this doesn't prove that
everything in AI is ok. In my opinion, present AI research suffers from some
major deficiencies apart from the fact that any scientists would achieve more if
they were smarter and worked harder.

1. Much work in AI has the ``look ma, no hands'' disease. Someone programs a
computer to do something no computer has done before and writes a paper pointing
out that the computer did it. The paper is not directed to the identification
and study of intellectual mechanisms and often contains no coherent account of
how the program works at all. As an example, consider that the SIGART Newsletter
prints the scores of the games in the ACM Computer Chess Tournament just as
though the programs were human players and their innards were inaccessible. We
need to know why one program missed the right move in a position - what was it
thinking about all that time? We also need an analysis of what class of
positions the particular one belonged to and how a future program might
recognize this class and play better.

McCarthy absolutely did not think that "playing games well doesn't really prove
anything". He believed that getting machines to play games[9] better than humans
would illuminate the mechanisms of the human mind that allow humans to play
chess, and to do other things besides. Chess was, for him, a model of human
thinking, the "drosophila of AI" [10], much like drosophila is a model organism
for biology research.

McCarthy would not have been happy with today's achievements in AI game playing,
such as AlphaGo and family. He would have considered them symptoms of the "look
ma, no hands disease", results with no real scientific significance [11].
Michie, who created the term "Ultra Strong Machine Learning" [12] to describe
machine learning that improves the performance of the human user would
probably have thought the same about today's uses of reinforcement learning.

However, neither of them would have agreed that "playing games well doesn't
really prove anything".

>> Why did the techniques from Big Blue not seem to go anywhere?

Note that Deep Blue, IBMI's chess-playing system that beat Gary Kasparov, did
not use machine learning. Only good, old minimax and an opening book of moves
compiled by chess grandmasters [13]. Minimax only works for board games, and
then two-player, zero-sum games with complete information, and so cannot be used
outside of chess, go, and other similar games. This is why it did "not seem to
go anywhere". It was the kind of AI that McCarthy blasted as having no
scientific value.

_______

[1] Like Donald Michie, but in the US.

[2] Like John McCarthy, but in the UK.

[3] I honestly have no idea. Probably important early pioneer of AI.

[4] The "Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine".

[5] Michie didn't have access to a computer.

[6] Great material about MENACE here: https://rodneybrooks.com/forai-machine-learning-explained/

[7] "Review of ``Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey''"
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/reviews/lighthill/lighthi...

[8] Oops.

[9] Read: chess.

[10] http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/drosophila/drosophila.pdf

[11] https://www.wired.com/2011/10/john-mccarthy-father-of-ai-and...

"Computer chess has developed much as genetics might have if the geneticists
had concentrated their efforts starting in 1910 on breeding racing
Drosophila," McCarthy wrote following Deep Blue's win. "We would have some
science, but mainly we would have very fast fruit flies."

[12] "Machine learning in the next five years"
https%3A%2F%2Fdl.acm.org%2Fdoi%2F10.5555%2F3108771.3108781&usg=AOvVaw0rwP_cc1GnNGNs7dBa7Qao

[13] "AI: A Modern Approach" http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/ See chapter 5
"Adversarial Search and Games".