[escoz]

Yes, go have a finite number of board states, just 2.08168199382×10^170, just a bit over the 10^80 atoms in the universe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_and_mathematics

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Yes, but the point is that you 're not going to brute-force this. If it's finite you can hope to approximate it. If it's not finite, you can't even approximate it.

Look- take Monte Carlo methods. You can sample a very big number of events and hope to get some useful information from that. If you sample infinity, though, what do you get? Infinity.

[argonaut]

Not all of those board states are "novel." The true "dimensionality" of "novel patterns" in Go is much smaller.