Many people immediately assumed that chess would be solved: fully known, in all its pathways and combinations. They thought a fast electronic computer would play perfect chess, just as they thought it would make reliable long-term weather forecasts. Shannon made a rough calculation, however, and suggested that the number of possible chess games was more than 10 ¹²⁰—a number that dwarfs the age of the universe in nanoseconds. So computers cannot play chess by brute force; they must reason, as Shannon saw, along something like human lines.

James Gleick, The Information

Maybe see also this article on design studio culture; Brute Force Architecture.

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