Hacker News Reader

I'd be very surprised if the AlphaGo team didn't at least consult with a few Go players...

Except go (and all other well defined games) are the most trivial of domains. For real business problems, the difficulty is most often trying to determine what the problem is and how it relates to the rest of the world.

there was a strong model of the world in AlphaGo, which allowed it to accurately simulate games that followed the rules.

that is quite a lot of domain expertise, much more than in most ML systems.

Another way of saying this, is you don't really need the same level of domain expertise if the problem space is entirely defined by a small set of clearly articulated rules.