> It's never made sense to me that so many go players study AI go play in the hope of emulating it in a human game.

> We're not machines. We can't do thousands of Monte Carlo tree searches per second.

You sound so sure of that, but I have seen people catch a ball, and I am not so sure that any artificial person should be any more aware of the tremendous maths they are "solving"

From the perspective of a game with far fewer rules, "trying to imitate AI" might not mean anything like what you are thinking.