> I remember when we thought an AI capable of solving Go was astronomically impossible and yet here we are.
I thought this was because Go just wasn't studied nearly as much as chess due to none of the early computer pioneers being fans the way they were with Chess. The noise about "the uncountable number of possible board states" was always too reductive, the algorithm to play the game is always going to be more sophisticated than simply calculating all possible future moves after every turn.
That reductive explanation is more-or-less correct imo. All of the strongest AIs for these games in the past were tree-search based. Tree search is usually combined with loads of heuristics (and pruning strategies like alphabeta or negamax), so they're not literally calculating all possible moves, but go has an order of magnitude more possible moves available at every turn than chess. That's a huge difference which compounds exponentially as you search deeper into the tree.
I thought this was because Go just wasn't studied nearly as much as chess due to none of the early computer pioneers being fans the way they were with Chess. The noise about "the uncountable number of possible board states" was always too reductive, the algorithm to play the game is always going to be more sophisticated than simply calculating all possible future moves after every turn.