If it was making its own decisions in any way, it could play other things.
This is what the goal is, do you think they are just going to stop developing it for 10 years or something? Deep Mind was founded in 2013, 6 years ago, let that sink in, that AI already has intelligence of an ant, that's kind of incredible since it didn't exist 6 years ago and now is basically most advanced AI we have and it is not even close to being done, this is nothing, smartphones didn't exist 9 years ago and and look at what happened there, most everyone will tell you that for about 20 years AI was dead in the water for the sole reason that our tech was still sh-t, you can't run Deep Mind on a potato but you can run it on servers in 2016 no problem.
It rolls through every possible decision
It doesn't, that's the thing about Go, it's much more intuition based then chess, there too many moves, too many fields, even Deep Mind can't process so much information, that's the whole reason why people are taking this seriously.
Moore's law is no longer applicable. That time is over. Not that an example of tech getting faster is easy to place onto software running differently. But it does help.
Nop, not even close, some people keep whining about it being over while ignoring 40 other technologies that can already improve transistors to help keep us going for another 10 years, hell that's not even important, important part is that we finally have software to use the hardware, same as with VR, hardware was sh-t and we almost missed the moment when it finally became usable for software, we didn't know nearly enough about brain in the 90's, heck we don't know a lot now but we are not that far off either.
Just last year I would have told you that AI is a childish dream but everyone seems to be going in to the field right now, in smaller or bigger ways, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, IBM, everyone has an assistant or low level AI of some sort, tech is right, software is there, motivation for companies to finally start looking at this seriously is there, this is just very small baby steps, also don't forget one thing: AI doesn't have to do everything good, it has to do one thing really great and that's enough, you got amazing AI just driving cars, that's enough to change whole industry, you don't have to believe me but if you sort out the bullsh-t and look at this seriously that's the conclusion everyone in tech world is coming to.