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>It was noted that even in 9x9 Go, with a comparable branching factor to Chess, traditional Go programs are still no stronger than on big boards.

Are they not? MoGo beat pros of 9 Dan on 9x9 in 2011: https://www.lri.fr/~teytaud/mogo.html

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Well, I guess it was more true before the advent of Monte Carlo Tree Search. Even so, note that even in the case of MoGoTW in 2011, it played blind Go (this helps the computer), and out of 4 games, won two games against a 9p player, and lost 1 game to a 5p player. Though it is perhaps better than MoGo's performance on 19x19, it still isn't very good, doesn't seem much better than MoGo on 13x13, and performs much worse than computer Chess, despite a similar branching factor.

The branching factor is much larger, around 75 legal moves after the opening, while chess has at most like 30.

Fuego beat a pro in 2008 using MCTS actually.

The branching factor of 9x9 Go isn't 75. 75 could be the factor in early game, but the average factor is somewhere between 40 and 50, versus 35 in chess. State-space complexity is also considerably higher in Chess than in 9x9 Go.

Not sure what you meant regarding MCTS, I never said anything about MCTS not being able to beat pros.

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