That reductive explanation is more-or-less correct imo. All of the strongest AIs for these games in the past were tree-search based. Tree search is usually comb

That reductive explanation is more-or-less correct imo. All of the strongest AIs for these games in the past were tree-search based. Tree search is usually combined with loads of heuristics (and pruning strategies like alphabeta or negamax), so they're not literally calculating all possible moves, but go has an order of magnitude more possible moves available at every turn than chess. That's a huge difference which compounds exponentially as you search deeper into the tree.