At the HTM Workshop there was a lightning talk by David Doshay on Computer Go which is another application I thought of as soon as I read On Intelligence.
During the break after his talk a bunch of us were talking and he basically said that a lot of researchers were moving to Go because Chess was a solved problem (perhaps I should have pursued Go research more back when I was interested in 2001).
I asked if he knew of anyone who, instead of switching from Chess, was going back to make Computer Chess more human-like rather than simply better. He wasn't aware of any such work.
It seems to me that an interesting pursuit would be a sort of Turing Test of Chess where the goal is not to beat the human but to trick other humans reading a transcript of the game as to which was the human player.
(Yes, I read Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI a few years back)