Chess is a game of symbol manipulation. It isn't played in the real world and its rules don't require human bodies the way field sports do.

> Chess is a game of symbol manipulation. It isn't played in the real world and its rules don't require human bodies the way field sports do.

I didn't mean "humanoid" as in "C3PO sitting across from the player at a table", I meant humanoid thought processes.

As far as I know, none of the chess engines are humanoid in the way they determine the next best move.

For one, they are all using far, far more instant-recall capacity than any human, ever.

> its rules don't require human bodies the way field sports do.

Which rule in football, tennis, american football, baseball, basketball or hockey requires humanoid players?

They may preclude robots as players, but that's a post-hoc fallacy - "they require all players to be humans, so therefore robots cannot replace humans like in Chess".

> I didn't mean "humanoid" as in "C3PO sitting across from the player at a table", I meant humanoid thought processes. As far as I know, none of the chess engines are humanoid in the way they determine the next best move.

Sure, and if you had android basketball players or soccer players, they would probably play the game differently as well.

> Which rule in football, tennis, american football, baseball, basketball or hockey requires humanoid players?

The totality of the rules put together tend to require that. For instance, in the NFL, whether or not a player carrying the ball is considered "down" depends upon their elbow or knee touching the ground, which implies that they need to have elbows and knees. Whether or not a catch is considered in bounds depends upon both feet touching the ground in bounds, which implies that they need to have feet. And so forth. Soccer has specific rules about the hands, feet, and head, while basketball's rules around dribbling specify hands and footsteps.

Obviously you could build a robot that looked like a dalek with a pneumatic cannon and design the robot to shoot a ball, and that robot would probably be better than human players at shooting baskets or completing football passes, but it wouldn't actually be able to play the full game according to the same rules that apply to human players.