AlphaGo didn’t think. It computed. Millions of self-play games eating a bounded problem whole. The world called it creative, intuitive, alien. It wasn’t.

Go is closed. Fixed board. Known rules. Clean win condition. The only thing making it hard for humans is that the search space is bigger than any type of memory we possess.

Real problems have more than a million possible moves, a thousand allies, and a hundred enemies. They yield to the one thing a machine cannot fake: Stakes. AlphaGo loses a game and plays another. Humans lose resources, sovereignty, friends, and sleep. Stakes separate toys from real games.

Read Mastering the Game of Go Without Human Knowledge