[dgacmu]

Strongly disagree. There are a lot of approximation algorithms and heuristics in wide use - to the tune of trillions of dollars, in fact, when you consider transportation and logistics, things like asic place & route, etc. These are all intractable perfect info problems that are so widespread and commercially important that they amplify the effect of even modest improvements.

(You said problems, not games...)

[AstralStorm]

Indeed, there are a few problems where even with perfect information you will be hard pressed to solve them. But that is only a question of computational power or the issue when the algorithm does not allow efficient approximation (not in APX space or co-APX).

The thing is, an algorithm that can work with fewer samples and robustly tolerating mistakes in datasets (also known as imperfect information) will be vastly cheaper and easier to operate. Less tedious sample data collection and labelling.

Working with lacking and erroneous information (without known error value) is necessarily a crucial step towards AGI; as is extracting structure from such data.

This is the difference between an engineering problem and research problem.

[dgacmu]

Perhaps a unifying way of saying this is: it's a research problem to figure out how to get ML techniques to the point they outperform existing heuristics on "hard" problems. Doing so will result in engineering improvements to the specific systems that need approximate solutions to those problems.

I completely agree about the importance of imperfect information problems. In practice, many techniques handle some label noise, but not optimally. Even MNIST is much easier to solve if you remove the one incorrectly-labeled training example. (one! Which is barely noise. Though as a reassuring example from the classification domain, JFT is noisy and still results in better real world performance than just training on imagenet.)