Specifically, you code it to engage and waste the time of the people on the other side of those scams to waste their time with false positives that they believe to have been hooked by the system. The scammers are working too and everything depends on ROI. If they are having to invest more and more time the returns stop being worth it.

If you can teach an AI to do that, you can fix one of the web's biggest nuisances.

I wonder what the effort would be to take an existing turing test bot and apply it to my spam folder.

Of course once this technique is used the spammers will be forced to deploy their own AIs to deal with the increase in response rates. Which of course this act will come to be called our first AI War. :P

Starcraft like 3d worlds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC5ZtPazvF0&feature=youtu.be...

Imagination and the hippocampus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X-NdPtFKq0&feature=youtu.be...

And longer term he's said he'd like to use AI for science research like going through CERN's petabytes of data looking for new physics.

Not sure about "high profile" but there are a lot of other abstract strategy games out there, which might be candidates:

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

But what a lot of people seem to be talking about is AI vs human in something like Starcraft. My personal hope is that researchers working on this kind of video game playing AI will use an Open Source game though, so it will be easier for others to follow along, participate, etc.

If you're Larry Page, what do you do with DeepMind now?

Good question, because it's hard to know exactly how well this generalizes to other domain(s). That would probably be one of the first questions I'd start looking into.

I think that is a quite interesting challenge, but high profile? too few people know that game.

Also, measuring that the computer is better will be problematic, as humans (or, for that matter, computers) could conspire to let one of their own ilk win.