[iamflimflam1]

> It's strange today to remember that playing chess well was seen as a great marker of AI, but today we consider it much less so.

It was seen as so difficult to do that research should be abandoned.

Projects in category B were held to be failures. One important project, that of "programming and building a robot that would mimic human ability in a combination of eye-hand co-ordination and common-sense problem solving", was considered entirely disappointing. Similarly, chess playing programs were no better than human amateurs. Due to the combinatorial explosion, the run-time of general algorithms quickly grew impractical, requiring detailed problem-specific heuristics.

The report stated that it was expected that within the next 25 years, category A would simply become applied technologies engineering, C would integrate with psychology and neurobiology, while category B would be abandoned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthill_report

[rjsw]

The linked post points out that it is a low-cost area of research and you don't need to explain the context to a reviewer.