I fully agree, pruning is the important thing. It saves time which is essential when you are playing against the clock.
This is the fantastic thing about Houdini, the engine I mentioned earlier on in the thread. It is like an anti engine, engine. It will go to where positions are unclear in its evaluation and give it some wellie in the evaluation department where other engines might of just pruned it off. Doesn't seem much but this romantic way of playing has been killing other engines. This is where subjectivity beats objectivity. Concentrating on other engines weaknesses. Kasparov made a killing at it.
There are chess engines though that are self learning, These are the new breed, which are far and few between. Giraffe is perhaps the latest well known one but it is not one which I would determine as true self-learning. Those beasts are a few generations off at least.
The problem is it's difficult to evaluate which is the best. That requires a function to assess each final position and that is an objective assessment, unless one of the paths leads to mate of course.
I was listening on the radio talking about football stats like pass completion, they were saying the next stage was to weight the quality of the passes/tackles/runs etc. John Stones has the highest pass success rate in the PL - but quantify that against someone like Alexis Sanchez who doesn't even rank in the top 200.
Chris Anderson's book goes into the subject of football statistics. There are several large companies dedicated to the collection and analysis of football statistics. Their individual methods of course are top secret. They sell their product to clubs willing to pay for it. I'm willing to bet that every club in the Premier League subscribes to one or more of these services.
I'm sure these statistics have a major influence on tactics and the buying and selling of players.
I'll have to go through the games and see what's going on. I'm a bit suspect on what's being claimed here especially with no opening book in its system.
Seems the hype machine has gone into overdrive on this.
Been doing the rounds on the chess sites seeing what people had to say on this, and they're not impressed.
They have limited the capabilities of Stockfish to work out its moves. Also, the learning capabilities of AlphaZero seem to tail off after a few hours.