As we shall see, general game playing is an interesting application in its own right.
It's intellectually engaging and more than a little fun.
But it's much more than that.
It serves as an analog for applications of logic in other areas such as business and law, science and engineering, and other areas.
More fundamentally, it raises questions about the nature of intelligence and serves as a laboratory which through evaluate competing approaches to intelligence.
Game descriptions provide full information about a world and determine optimal strategies as a baseline for evaluating agent behavior.
By its nature, the general game playing setting can be used to evaluate problem solving strategies and by extension theories of intelligence
by taking into account representation, incompleteness of information and ressource bounds.
The idea of using applications like general game playing for such purposes is not new.
It was in 1958 that John McCarty invented the concept of the "advice taker".
The idea was simple: he wanted a machine that he could program by description.
He would describe the intended environment and the desired goal, and the machine would use that information in determining its behavior.
There would be no programming in the traditional sense.
McCarthy presented his concept in a paper that has become a classic in the field of AI. Here is a quote:
It was an ambitious goal, but those were times of high hopes and grand ambitions.
The idea caught the imaginations of numerous subsequent researchers, notably Bob Kowalski, the high priest of logic programming, and Ed Feigenbaum, the inventor of knowledge engineering.
In a paper written in 1974, Feigenbaum gave us the most forceful statement of McCarthy's ideal:
Okay so one final remark: some have argued that the way to achieve intelligent behavior is through specialization.
That may work so long as the assumptions one makes in building such a assumptions are true.
For a general intelligence however, general intellectual capabilities are needed and such systems should be capable of performing well in a wide variety of tasks.
To paraphrase the words of Robert Heinlein:
Those of us who are more interested in artificial intelligence than artificial insects agree with Heinlein.