To date, building programs that beat humans at checkers and chess has meant creating a series of idiots savants. Each feat has been a massive software and/or hardware project, requiring many person-years of effort. Clearly, this type of progress is not scalable. What’s more, games like chess represent a tiny subset of the problems that humans tackle. The rules are set and do not change. The board is small. There is no chance or hidden information. The game result is a zero sum. In the real world, none of that applies.