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You have a few good points, none of which deny the argument's conclusion.

Biological systems do have a primary goal, that of maintaining their own organization and reproducing. From this derives common cost function for a video game, i.e. stay alive. Another, finding new information in the environment, also derives from the staying alive goal.

Degrees of freedom is a interesting example: from the movement sciences we know that while humans have in principle many degrees of freedom, when performing a task, the nervous system plays two roles: 1) highly constrain teh degrees of freedom and 2) act within the unconstrained subspace. The latter is what all the various ungeneralizable AIs are doing. The former, contraction of degrees of freedom, is the part which is difficult and constitutes a general AI, but it's essentially a learning problem, where the subspace of important degrees of freedom must be learned through interaction.

"None of these descriptions fit the kind of control that an 'intelligent' system needs to handle." This is true for the output, but the output probably needs to be limited while successful algorithms are developed. The ability for a pattern recognition + actuation system to play a variety of games better than humans would be a significant breakthrough in AI.

I say "would be", because deepmind, while impressive, is not a very solution to the problem -- it performs poorly in any game involving memory, but performs well in reflex games.

An algorithm that could perform across a variety of games would be analagous to programming a "smart worm" (c. elegans has 4 muscle bundles) in terms of outputs, and maybe mouse-like in terms of inputs.

All research has to start somewhere. And the space for video games is much larger than the one you describe. In 2003 Steel Battalion was released for Xbox, the controller for which had around 40 separate inputs. Or consider older Point and Click adventures; though the only physical interface was a mouse with a few buttons, it is required of the player to synthesize all the information given to them (conversations, items, recognition of clickable things), and act on all available stimuli in a (usually) logical manner, something that requires much more than ~5 inputs. For a modern game, you should look into Dwarf Fortress[1]. This game has no end state, no defined goal (other than survive), and you are given little real information about the dwarves themselves, other than what is gained through observation and inspection. The inputs for that game span the entire keyboard, and are in general more akin to old text-adventure games in terms of complexity. And it is a serious game. If I was better at it I would play much more often. But my FPS is dead by the time I reach 80 dwarves and the seiges begin.

My point is, video games are far more complex than what you propose, and are not always as well defined. There is ample room for experiment and research.

[1]:http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

Moreover, these were designed by humans with very explicit successes, losses and easily distinguishable outcomes.

This is only true if you assume a TON of contextual knowledge of biology, human culture, civilization, warfare, etc. Why should an AI have any of that?

Look even at an extremely simple game such as tick-tack-toe (or noughts and crosses). How should an AI learn to play this game? Assume it has been given no knowledge of the game beforehand, like a human child shown the game for the first time. How should the AI know who wins and who loses the game? How should it know that the objective is to win at all? The idea that winning is desirable seems to be hard-wired into human beings; why should that be the case for an AI?

Correct. The argument is much stronger if you replace "game" with "simulated environment." And your point about the flexibility of our motions and how closely tied that is to the development of real intelligence is spot on.

That might be true, but as long as we are still quite a bit away from the point where an advanced AI could successfully play a complex open world game like Skyrim, GTA5 or the Witcher, it is a good next step to work on.