"Fotland, an early computer Go innovator, also worked as chief engineer of Hewlett Packard’s PA-RISC processor in the 70s, and tested the system with his Go program. “There’s some kind of mental leap that has to happen to get you past that block, and the programs ran into the same issue. The issue is being able to look at the whole board, not the just the local fights.”
Fotland and others tried to figure out how to modify their programs to integrate full-board searches. They met with some limited success, but by 2004, progress stalled again, and available options seemed exhausted. Increased processing power was moot. To run searches even one move deeper would require an impossibly fast machine. The most difficult game looked as if it couldn’t be won."
Thank you for the source. I believe this is a good written example of how conservative estimates were as recently as May of 2014.
Nonetheless, the quoted estimate in the article (mentioned twice, including in the second sentence) is "I think maybe ten years", ie 2024, which while inaccurate is probably "in our lifetimes".
There are a lot of quotes in that article though. And a number are in the vein of not being sure how they were going to get from where they were to better-than-human. Not my field in any case but I think it's fair to say that there was a lot of skepticism about even the general path going forward even relatively recently.
Fotland and others tried to figure out how to modify their programs to integrate full-board searches. They met with some limited success, but by 2004, progress stalled again, and available options seemed exhausted. Increased processing power was moot. To run searches even one move deeper would require an impossibly fast machine. The most difficult game looked as if it couldn’t be won."
http://www.wired.com/2014/05/the-world-of-computer-go/
The article then goes on to discuss how Monte Carlo was the real breakthrough.