>> But the defeat of the tactics born from this mindset by MCTS at least for now lay bare the fact that the path to being good at go is actually to probabilistically sample the phase space of the game and perform impossibly mindless statistics on the game outcome an enormous number of times ...

This is a rationalist opinion that is attractive because it appears unbiased, unwilling to make any concessions to human nature and to recognise its limitations.

And yet- this same opinion overlooks the greatest source of scientific wonderment in the victories of AlphaGo and family against the best human players.

Which is to say: that human players play Go (and Chess, and Poker, and Magic: the Gathering etc) very differently than machines. In particular, human players do none of the extremely tedious, extremely computationally intensive maths that computer players have to do. Human players don't perform MCTS, neither do they train by self-play for many thousands of human-years.

Somehow, humans can play Go and Chess and all manner of board games _without_ having to do any of the hard work that only computers can do reliably. We are not particularly good at those games- but we can play them well enough that beating the best of us still takes huge amounts of computational power.

How we do this, why we are even capable of doing this and what other benefits it confers to us: _that_ is the interesting set of questions. That a big machine can outperform a human ... we have known this since ancient times.

  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
  Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
  - Hamlet (1.5.167-8)