[throwaway47861]

>Guess what, no one, not even the most optimistic person, would predict it will beat the best human player in 10 years.

This is what I call living in a bubble, dear sir/madam.

I grew in a small town in Eastern Europe (~100k population) and me plus the local 50 or so programmers (using Apple II and 8086-based computers), in 1996, while we were in our teenage years, were painfully aware that games like chess and Go are brute-force-able with some elements of recognizing and memorizing viable strategies (and throwing out the unviable ones early on). And that was what, 15-19 year old late teenagers, and we knew it. So be sure that many people knew it -- they just never chose that area of expertise specifically.

This also says a lot about the quality of the average professors and textbooks, but let's not go off-topic, plus it's a huge discussion area.