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It is interesting that it was solved in large part by not relying fully on brute force search.

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positions, to be precise (over 2 * 10^170).

https://tromp.github.io/go/legal.html

It was surprising at the time, too.

When I heard of the breakthrough in CNN's on imagenet the first thing I thought of was "wow I wonder if you can use them on Go". Of course I never executed on this idea. I'm mentioning to show that it was not that non-obvious.