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Yes, it's astounding (if true) that Pocket Fritz only searches 20k nodes per second, compared to Deep Blue's 200M. There must be some serious positional intelligence involved there!

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Simple improvements in the tree search algorithms to reduce the effective branching factor are enough. Those have exponential effects.

Improving the evaluation function is "merely" a constant improvement.

Your average GM is also not Gary Kasparov. The difference between a typical GM and one of the handful of elites is pretty astounding.

For a graphical grasp of this concept, take a bell curve, and then plot only the top 0.1% of the bell curve. That's the distribution of abilities among people who are any good at all at chess, and it is no longer anything close to a bell curve.

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