I agree with Rain. Understanding implies a much deeper model than playing. To make the comparison to chess, you would have to change it to something like, “Controlling Earth’s destiny is only modestly harder than making something that can learn chess, or any other board game, without that game’s mechanics (or any mapping from the computer’s output to game moves) being hard-coded, and then play it at an expert level.”
I agree with Rain. Understanding implies a much deeper model than playing. To make the comparison to chess, you would have to change it to something like, “Controlling Earth’s destiny is only modestly harder than making something that can learn chess, or any other board game, without that game’s mechanics (or any mapping from the computer’s output to game moves) being hard-coded, and then play it at an expert level.”
Not obviously false, I think.