Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not an improved tree search. Deepmind was almost pro level purely using the deep learning network before doing any Monte Carlo search. One way of looking at the significance of this is that it might tell us that relatively simple machine learning algorithms can capture key aspects of the versatile human cortical capacity to learn things like Go using sheer pattern recognition. (It's amazing that human visual cor…
Regardless of how good the deep learning network is on its own, the algorithm described in the DeepMind paper is an improved tree search.
Monte Carlo Tree Search was necessary and itself a massive improvement over minimax but not sufficient for creating a Go program to challenge professional players. The true innovation here is the neural networks. Without those networks to guide it AlphaGo plays far worse than existing programs.
The fact that those networks are sufficient is pretty incredible. We already knew that by inventing them we had created a very pure form of pattern recognition, but it's surprising that the pattern recognition coupled with some tree search seems to be all you need to play Go as well as humans.
It's not impressive to you that we've now reproduced a piece of human intelligence, "intuition", which was previously considered out of reach?