[roenxi]

That wasn't quite the dynamic; the version that played against Fan Hui was pretty good. That would have been more than enough to claim that the AI was highly competitive against human professionals.

The surprise was that it was assumed that Neural Nets would scale exponentially like other computer projects - over the medium term, with a requirement to rewrite the program to take advantage of new hardware opportunities. The idea that the same program + 6 months could scale exponentially was pretty radical even to people who knew a lot about computers. I was certainly surprised because I'd made the assumption that AlphaGo could scale exponentially with improvements in graphics cards as opposed to exponentially with Google's commitment of computer hours. Obviously wrong in hindsight, but it wasn't a misunderstanding of exponentials, it was a misunderstanding of neural nets.

And we only really had one data point at the time, which was the Fan games. Couldn't even really draw a line without knowing a lot about the field.