[mirashii]

> Chess and go don't drive innovation, they are just a side effect of real innovation.

I'm not certain this is true. Take OpenAI as a potential counterexample. While not chess or go (at least, at the moment), they are likely to be considered innovating while still working on problems that would be considered roughly equivalent. Much of the field that has been called AI for a long time (not the current deep learning approaches) were pioneered by working on chess and go. It may well be the case that proving that a new class of techniques work on these well studied games is the first step in the innovation process, where those techniques are taken and applied to other problems.