You don't need to know anything about Go to read this. The game is just the fixed yardstick. The story is a hardware benchmark: the same program, the same problem, the same settings — only the machine changed, from a 2017 GPU cluster to a single 2026 graphics card. That makes it a rare clean measurement of one decade of progress.
What "solving" means here
There are two very different things a computer can do with a board game. It can play it well — that's what AlphaGo did. Or it can solve it: mathematically prove the outcome under perfect play from both sides, leaving no doubt. Solving is the hard one. You explore an enormous tree of "if I play here, they play there…" move sequences until you have an airtight proof. Each node in that tree is one position examined.
The target here is a single 7x7 opening called JA. In 2023, a NeurIPS paper (Game Solving with Online Fine-Tuning, Wu et al.) proved its verdict — that White cannot survive (Black captures everything) — using a cluster of twelve GTX 1080Ti GPUs running 384 parallel workers. The solver is guided by a neural network that estimates how hard each branch is, and crucially that network is fine-tuned online — it keeps learning during the solve.
