"Both the rules and strategy of Go feel more elegant in the mathematical sense of being a composition of simple ideas, which I like. Chess feels more like a set of arbitrary pieces of knowledge"
That is exactly the reason that I think go (1) may be solved before chess is solved.
For go, there are some results that give hope that an all encompassing theory exists. For chess, the best we have are results of exhaustive searches of relatively simple situations and a bunch of heuristics. It is true that, together, those have led to spectacular results, but I do not think they will lead to a proof about who wins chess.
(1) to be exact: Mathematical go, as defined in http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Go-Chilling-Gets-Point/dp.... ko rules can have variations, and there are variations in how to count points at the end of a game. Both may affect only a tiny fraction of games, but a alpha-beta search may need only one path that is a win under ruleset A and a loss under ruleset B to change the outcome of a game.
That is exactly the reason that I think go (1) may be solved before chess is solved.
For go, there are some results that give hope that an all encompassing theory exists. For chess, the best we have are results of exhaustive searches of relatively simple situations and a bunch of heuristics. It is true that, together, those have led to spectacular results, but I do not think they will lead to a proof about who wins chess.
(1) to be exact: Mathematical go, as defined in http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Go-Chilling-Gets-Point/dp.... ko rules can have variations, and there are variations in how to count points at the end of a game. Both may affect only a tiny fraction of games, but a alpha-beta search may need only one path that is a win under ruleset A and a loss under ruleset B to change the outcome of a game.