By the time they were trying to defeat the world champion, they didn't really think of it as an AI project any more. They often used the term "expert system", which had a much narrower scope. It had become a challenge unto itself, but they didn't expect it to lead to any kind of generalized intelligence.
It came rather out of nowhere when neural-net-type engines suddenly swept back into dominance. Even after becoming the world chess champion, nobody expected Go to be solved any time soon.
> but they didn't expect it to lead to any kind of generalized intelligence.
Do experts really expect any stream of AI research to lead to generalized intelligence (except in the very long term)? I was under the impression we really have no idea how to get there.
Right now it's an open question. But they realized fairly soon that chess was a matter of minimax plus expert heuristics plus brute force. It was pretty clear that it was more effective than an expert system approach, which remained viable for another few decades.
It came rather out of nowhere when neural-net-type engines suddenly swept back into dominance. Even after becoming the world chess champion, nobody expected Go to be solved any time soon.