Is this all a game?

When new technologies appear, the first applications seem to be defined by gamers. The playful, collaborative and — of course — competitive nature of games appeals to creative and innovative minds. Gamers are first movers. They are the white chess pieces on the board. From the world of business the reaction is often the opposite. New technologies are not serious. They do not work in the real life of mainframes, ERP systems and spreadsheets. Business plays black.

The quest for machine intelligence has used strategy games as the test bed and human intelligence as the benchmark. One by one, humans…