[gaze]

I just don't understand how deep learning is amenable to this problem. It's just a straight up optimization problem. How is deep learning appropriate?

[IshKebab]

I think it is probably appropriate. Chess and go are just "straight up optimization problems", but they're too difficult for traditional optimisation algorithms to work. You need something to do some fast pattern recognition to cut down on the search space. This is similar.

I expect if you search the literature you'll find a ton of work on this.