[coldtea]

>At the time, this was looked upon with dismay by the majority of computer-chess researchers who had pursued methods that leveraged human understanding of the special structure of chess.

This seems problematic as a concept in itself.

Sure human players have a "human understanding of the special structure of chess". But what makes them play could be an equally "deep search" and fuzzy computations done in the brain that and not some conscious step by step reasoning. Or rather, their "conscious step by step reasoning" to my opinion probably relies on tops on subconscious deep search in the brain for pruning the possible moves, etc.

I don't think anybody plays chess at any great level merely by making conscious step by step decisions.

Similar to how when we want to catch a ball thrown at us, we do some thinking like "they threw it to our right, so we better move right" but we also have tons of subconscious calculations of the trajectory (nobody sits and explicitly calculates the parabolic formula when they're thrown a baseball).