Go engine training surpasses this basic level of self-play effectively instantly.
The strongest early moves create the most potential for winning (maximizing potential winning paths, sort of); they do not push the game towards one best end state. They do not have counters. I saw elsewhere you have some understanding of the game (15kyu) so you should be able to demonstrate this to yourself by playing some of AlphaGo’s openings on a board and trying to write deterministic counters to them. You will not be able to push the AI into a situation where it has too few options to avoid loss. You will also find you need to create a book much larger than a few moves to meaningfully predict play and so will exceed the number of states that can be stored (referencing your 16TB comment elsewhere.)
Please actually try this as I think it is a key to improving your skill in addition to understanding the challenges in automating play.
The strongest early moves create the most potential for winning (maximizing potential winning paths, sort of); they do not push the game towards one best end state. They do not have counters. I saw elsewhere you have some understanding of the game (15kyu) so you should be able to demonstrate this to yourself by playing some of AlphaGo’s openings on a board and trying to write deterministic counters to them. You will not be able to push the AI into a situation where it has too few options to avoid loss. You will also find you need to create a book much larger than a few moves to meaningfully predict play and so will exceed the number of states that can be stored (referencing your 16TB comment elsewhere.)
Please actually try this as I think it is a key to improving your skill in addition to understanding the challenges in automating play.