Interesting post Guy.

I liked this quote from the Nature article:
"People continued to run for sport after the invention of the automobile."
Ed Trice, games expert.

My gut feeling is that if the solution could be reduced to a book format
(small enough to not crush you when opening it), that would hurt the
popularity of the game a lot (like looking up a Rubik cube solution). There
is no functional difference in following the algorithm through a book or
watching it on screen in a silicon implementation, but I think there is a
still a mystery, a sense of an automata or a spirit in the box inside a
computer, but a book doesn't hold that.

Regards
RichardV