Hi Robert!
I would love to see more development on the engine and the neural nets. There are plenty of questions that could be asked when it comes to neural net topology and training methods. However, from my point of view based on my experience, I think the quality of a neural net evaluation actually depends mostly on the training methods. I would of course be interesting to see some research on deep learning (and maybe even recurrent neural net topology) but I rather think effort is best used in the training methods.
(I would love to see it and I would love to be proved wrong!)
What about other techniques? MCTS? Or some kind of Markov decision Model? Can we, base on today's available technology, rethink the whole idea? Huge distributed databases or Distributed Hash Tables? Simplified evaluation function combined with deeper search? The neural network idea is from the 1990's. Today we have much more technology that can provide us other solutions. More memory, more storage, more distribution etc. Can we maybe even take a step back, and consider other solutions than a neural nets based solution?
best regards,
-Øystein