Go players rely heavily on pattern recognition and heuristics, something we know humans to be exceptionally good at.
For example, go players habitually think in terms of "shape"[1]. Good shape is neither too dense (inefficiently surrounding territory) or too loose (making the stones vulnerable to capture). Strong players intuitively see good shape without conscious effort.
Go players will often talk about "counting" a position[2] - consciously counting stones and spaces to estimate the score or the general strength of a position. This is in contrast to their usual mode of thinking, which is much less quantitative.
Go is often taught using proverbs[3], which are essentially heuristics. Phrases like "An eye of six points in a rectangle is alive" or "On the second line eight stones live but six stones die" are commonplace. They are very useful in developing the intuition of a player.
As I understand it, the search space is largely irrelevant to human players because they rarely perform anything that approximates a tree search. Playing out imaginary moves ("reading", in the go vernacular) is generally used sparingly in difficult positions or to confirm a decision arrived at by intuition.
Go is the board game that most closely maps to the human side of Moravec's paradox[4], because calculation has such low value. AlphaGo uses some very clever algorithms to minimise the search space, but it also relies on 4-5 orders of magnitude more computer power than Deep Blue.
For example, go players habitually think in terms of "shape"[1]. Good shape is neither too dense (inefficiently surrounding territory) or too loose (making the stones vulnerable to capture). Strong players intuitively see good shape without conscious effort.
Go players will often talk about "counting" a position[2] - consciously counting stones and spaces to estimate the score or the general strength of a position. This is in contrast to their usual mode of thinking, which is much less quantitative.
Go is often taught using proverbs[3], which are essentially heuristics. Phrases like "An eye of six points in a rectangle is alive" or "On the second line eight stones live but six stones die" are commonplace. They are very useful in developing the intuition of a player.
As I understand it, the search space is largely irrelevant to human players because they rarely perform anything that approximates a tree search. Playing out imaginary moves ("reading", in the go vernacular) is generally used sparingly in difficult positions or to confirm a decision arrived at by intuition.
Go is the board game that most closely maps to the human side of Moravec's paradox[4], because calculation has such low value. AlphaGo uses some very clever algorithms to minimise the search space, but it also relies on 4-5 orders of magnitude more computer power than Deep Blue.