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> Isn't that framing what the sentiment used to be towards computers playing Go,

No. I was a student in the mid-90s, and the position of everyone regarding Go was "We'll have enough compute power one day".

It was only after AlphaGo hit the news with its wins that I started seeing this revisionist history of "They said the computer will never win at Go".

To which I have to reply "No. They did not".

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I went to a talk given by computer experts on the game of Go about 10 years before AlphaGo and the consensus was that the solution space was so large[0] that it was impossible to solve by a computer, whatever its capability, in the foreseeable future, by the methods known at the time. We now know that AlphaGo followed a somewhat new approach, but I don't remember that being obvious or expected back then...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_and_mathematics#Game_tree_c...

There is a difference between being better than humans and having solved a game. Could you clarify what exactly the experts were saying? Everything in the Wikipedia article you linked seems to be talking only about solving it so I'm really curious.

XKCD is relevant as a historical reference in this case which is pretty neat.

https://xkcd.com/1002/

Well played!

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