A College Project That Planted a Seed Years ago I was on a university team trying to build a Go AI. We explored monte carlo simulation for lookahead search, basic neural networks for pattern recognition, and expert systems for encoding domain knowledge. None of them worked well enough on their own. Go's branching factor is enormous, so brute-force search fails quickly. Neural networks without the right training data go nowhere. And even carefully written rules eventually hit a wall against a skilled human opponent. Then AlphaGo happened, and it was hard not to feel a little awe. AlphaGo was not purely any one of those things. Its neural networks learned to evaluate board positions and suggest candidate moves, but a structured tree search still imposed discipline: constraining where the network could look, and how. Neither component could have done it alone. AlphaGo is probably not a textbook example of neuro-symbolic AI, but the general idea still struck me. Learned intuition, bounded by structure.…