>Alphago was not such an event. Yes, we did predict that Alphago is decades away, but that's assuming that academics will continue working on it at their pace u

>Alphago was not such an event. Yes, we did predict that Alphago is decades away, but that's assuming that academics will continue working on it at their pace using their limited resources. No expert was surprised with Alphago. No expert will be surprised when Starcraft or Dota is solved. It's simply a matter of compute and some tricks here and there. Why? Because these are closed systems, with good simulators available. You just need to keep playing and storing the actions in a big lookup table a la Ned Block, and you're done. AlphaGo worked according to statistics, not lookup tables. Bit of a difference. That said, theoreticians may not have been surprised, but there's a huuuuuge difference between what's doable in theory (sufficiently large neural nets are universal function approximators, after all), and what the resource requirements for problems we care about actually turn out to be. We should all have been fairly pleasantly surprised that AlphaGo required only a small data-center worth of graphics cards for training, and could then play on less hardware than that.