What I’m curious about is how much this reflects an attempt by AlphaGo to conserve computational resources.
If I understand correctly, at least according to the Nature paper, it doesn’t explicitly optimize for this. Game-playing software is often perceived as playing “conservatively”, this is a general property of minimax search, and in the limit the Nash equilibrium consists of maximally conservative strategies.
but I was still surprised by the amount of thought that went into some of the moves.
Maybe these obvious moves weren’t so obvious at that level.
Has he ever demonstrated any ability to produce anything technically valuable?