The professional Go community in Japan has libraries and institutions dating back about 300 years. There are two other branches of game theory, which have significantly different emphases than combinatorial game theory. The AI approach to game-playing emphasizes very hard problems, including the play of openings and middle games which are so complicated that even the best human experts remain unsure whether any winning move exists or not. Limited search followed by heuristic evaluation and backtracking are the favored AI methods. Many devotees of artificial intelligence hope or believe that there will be considerable commonality in the best programs for chess, checkers, Go, Othello, etc.
Skeptics see little such commonality in the best programs today.
The standards of artificial intelligence are necessarily empirical rather than logical. Performance of programs is evaluated subjectively, and by competitions against each other or against human experts. Since no one knows which of their moves are correct and which are not, many AI programs which are fully debugged still do not play a very strong game. Combinatorial game theorists are quite willing to use software tools and systems developed by AI practitioners. Many AI buffs are quite willing to use results of combinatorial game theory whenever relevant results exist.