You're right of course. the branching factor of Go really only shows how much more difficult it is to blindly brute force than Chess. It's worth saying that n

You're right of course. the branching factor of Go really only shows how much more difficult it is to blindly brute force than Chess. It's worth saying that neither game is close to being solved completely (as in mapping every possible game state). Creative techniques must be used in both games to cull out large chunks of the search space. I definitely see how the more simplistic movement rules (and lack of variety of piece types) in Go would make it easier to cull off large swathes of the search space. Despite this my gut tells me that the branching factor is still the best benchmark we have (and easiest to convey) for comparing the computational difficulty of solving a board game with an adversarial search algorithm.