AI is search, brute-force or otherwise. There are a number of fascinating things that have come out of chess research on the way to grandmaster-level play, and

AI is search, brute-force or otherwise. There are a number of fascinating things that have come out of chess research on the way to grandmaster-level play, and even if the strongest chess players are all computers, that doesn't mean that it's suddenly become a worthless pursuit. The day that a perfect game of chess is played is the day that it gets boring, not before. With respect to go, the current approach is completely brute force; it plays thousands of games at random, and uses the percentage of wins by one side to evaluate the strength of the position. The challenge is how to use the information you've already encountered in your searches to reduce the search-space to something manageable.