[jorgemf]

Board games have been used in AI since the beginning. They provide a good environment as we know the rules and control them. Also as everybody uses them it is easier to compare different algorithms. Most advances in AI were done in board games. Most probably chatGPT uses lot of those things you think are irrelevant in board games (reinforcement learning for fine tuning the responses with human feedback, same algorithms used in board games).

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

If chess was interesting enough for Ken Thompson to work on, that's good enough for me.