It’s often said that there are more potential configurations of a Go board than there are atoms in the known universe; one million trillion trillion trillion trillion more configurations in fact! With so many possibilities, traditional approaches stood no chance. When IBM’s Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, it used the so-called brute-force technique, where an algorithm aims to systematically crunch through as many possible moves as it can. That approach is hopeless in a game with as many branching outcomes as Go.
