Some explanation of why these are natural domains to look at might be nice. With the exception of chess and go they seem to all be problems where solving them is of wide interest and the problems in question are very general. Chess and go seem to be not at all natural problems but mainly of interest because they show what sort of improvements can happen to a narrow problem when a lot goes into improving those specific problems (although that’s not all that is going on here since the article does discuss how hardware improvement has mattered a lot).
It might also make sense at some point to branch out some of these problems a little more, such as focusing on 3-SAT rather than general SAT, or looking at work which has focused on factoring specific types of integers (such as the ongoing project to factor Mersenne numbers).
Some explanation of why these are natural domains to look at might be nice. With the exception of chess and go they seem to all be problems where solving them is of wide interest and the problems in question are very general. Chess and go seem to be not at all natural problems but mainly of interest because they show what sort of improvements can happen to a narrow problem when a lot goes into improving those specific problems (although that’s not all that is going on here since the article does discuss how hardware improvement has mattered a lot).
It might also make sense at some point to branch out some of these problems a little more, such as focusing on 3-SAT rather than general SAT, or looking at work which has focused on factoring specific types of integers (such as the ongoing project to factor Mersenne numbers).
I think the problems were selected largely on the basis of which data were easiest to obtain, so as to start under the streetlight.