[chii]

is it more important for a chess engine to be able to think? Or is it able to win by brute force through searching a sufficient outcome?

If the outcome is indistinguisable from using "thinking" as the process rather than brute force, why would the process matter regarding how the outcome was achieved?

[suddenlybananas]

maybe if programming were a well-defined game like chess, but it's not.

[chii]

the grammar of a programming language is just as well defined. And the defined-ness of the "game" isn't required for my argument.

Your concept of thinking is the classic retoric - as soon as some "ai" manages to achieve something which previously wasn't capable, it's no longer AI and is just xyz process. It happened with chess engines, with alphago, and with LLMs. The implication being that human "thinking" is somehow unique and only the AI that replicate it can be considered to have "thinking".