[icc97]

I think the point was that Deep Blue was using brute force, where as Alpha Go had taught itself and Alpha Go Zero has gone the full distance to require zero outside help.

So Deep Blue wasn't such a big step in terms of General Artificial Intelligence because it was heavily dependent on the human optimisations and was just showing the power of number crunching rather than learning.

[fjsolwmv]

It's more of a continuum than that. Yes deep blue had more hand-tuning and custom-built structure. AlphaGo had less hand tuning and of course waaaay more brute Force on top.