> I've been giving it some thought. When I was learning to play Go as a teenager in China, I followed a fairly standard, classical learning path. First I learned the rules, then progressively I learn the more abstract theories and tactics. Many of these theories, as I see them now, draw analogies from the physical world, and are used as tools to hide the underlying complexity (chunking), and enable the players to think at a higher level.

The excellent point you're making applies in general to nearly every type of human thinking.

The way we think about other people, our intuitions about probabilities, our predictions about politics, and so on -- all are based on our peculiarly effective, yet woefully approximate, analogy based reasoning.

It shouldn't be surprising in the least when commonly accepted "expert" heuristics are proved wrong by AIs that actually search the space of possibilities with orders of magnitude more depth than we can. What's surprising -- and I think still a mystery -- is how human heuristics are able to perform so well to begin with.

I'm not a Go player, but I saw this same phenomenon as poker bots have surpassed humans in ability. As with AlphaGo, they make plays that fly in the face of years of "expert" wisdom. Of course, as with any revolutionary thinking, some of the new strategies are "obvious" in hindsight, and experts now use them. Others seem to require the computational precision of a computer to be effective in practice, and so can't be co-opted. That is, we can't extract a new human-compatible "heuristic" from them -- the complexity is just irreducible.