>develop a team of robots that play soccer so well they can win the World Cup

How is this any better that "build a bot that can beat Chess Masters" ?? Well, apart from the part where this includes multiple agents, and swarm robotics, etc. But frankly, setting a game as a bar actually covers relatively less scope in my opinion. Conversational bot actually does cover a LOT of scope if you think about all the possible ways the conversation can be taken. In fact, we as humans use conversation to judge other humans' intelligence as well. E.g. job interviews.

Though perhaps an advanced turing test could include performance in a variety of social situations like...

- convince employers to hire you, - Convince a girl to go out with you - Convince a customer to buy something - Debates... (Presidential debates by AI would be interesting)

Though how accurate the Turing test correlates to "intelligence" can be debated, Turing himself believed that mastery of language demonstrates reasonable intelligence.

However, in this case, "Eugene" claimed English as his second language, which seems as close to cheating as it gets.

How is "winning at soccer" a better proxy for sentience than "able to hold up its end of a conversation"?

One of the ironies of AI is that trivial tasks for humans like recognizing a soccer ball, moving around without falling over, or, yes, holding a conversation are very, very difficult while difficult tasks, like playing chess or finding the best route on a map, are relatively trivial.

Is it really better? It sounds completely within capabilities of current robotics and algorithms. Mix up DARPA robots and AI from FIFA and you'll likely have a winning team.

Please. That is many decades away, and the hard part about it is definitely not the soccer strategy AI...