> To be fair, in terms of the complexity of rules, checkers is easier to understand than go which is easier to understand than chess. And honestly, go seems like the kind of brute-force simple, parallel problem that we can solve now without too much programming effort
Your intuition is mistaken. Go is indeed "easier to understand" than Chess in terms of its rules, but it is arguably harder to play well and has a way larger search space, which makes it less amenable to brute force, and this was precisely why people thought it'd be impossible for a computer to play it consistently at champion level.
I don't think the achievement of AlphaGo is solely due to increased processing power, otherwise why did people think Go was such a hard problem?
Your intuition is mistaken. Go is indeed "easier to understand" than Chess in terms of its rules, but it is arguably harder to play well and has a way larger search space, which makes it less amenable to brute force, and this was precisely why people thought it'd be impossible for a computer to play it consistently at champion level.
I don't think the achievement of AlphaGo is solely due to increased processing power, otherwise why did people think Go was such a hard problem?