But is this true as humans play it? I'm not good enough at either to really know for sure, but my impression is that while the branching factor makes a big dif

But is this true as humans play it? I'm not good enough at either to really know for sure, but my impression is that while the branching factor makes a big difference for computers, it is essentially impossible for a human to manage the branching in either game (massive numbers of branches vs exceptionally massive numbers of branches). As a result, humans play both games at a high level by relying on intuition. For instance, I read a while back (approximating and paraphrasing to follow...) that top chess players can think up to 10 moves ahead along a very few branches. So let's say that in chess, there are 30 million possible positions to evaluate, and in go, there are 300 trillion. They're both such an order of magnitude different for humans that it makes really no difference in terms of how we play the game, so intuition takes over. For computers, it's a different story.