[cLeEOGPw]

Your described method of understanding his moves might work for some moves, but there will inevitably be moves that are just a sum of so many different probabilities that are so far down the road that even looking at the result nobody would be able to actually recognize such a move on slightly different board.

At some point, if this method would be used, it would probably require a second AI that would help understand the main AI, because the primary "explanation" would still be too complex and/or subtle for us to comprehend.

[btilly]

Obviously "automatically extract the principles in an understandable format" is a long term and probably unachievable goal.

However there is hope that cluster analysis on data about the internal reasoning process can successfully identify groups of positions that "seem to share a common principle". Success in that is a first step towards lots of interesting things.