Update : nowadays, top chess engines (AlphaZero, Stockfish 13) rely on neural networks which are basically black boxes.
It doesn’t undermine your point though. NL’s objection is indeed invalid.
Additionally, the neural nets (afaik) are used in evaluation of a position, but not for stateful “strategy”. That is, the overall algorithm has a heuristic evaluation function (potentially incorporating a neural network), and then chooses a move by doing the sort of “future calculation” that humans do, except in fancy ways to make it compute fast.
Update : nowadays, top chess engines (AlphaZero, Stockfish 13) rely on neural networks which are basically black boxes. It doesn’t undermine your point though. NL’s objection is indeed invalid.
Additionally, the neural nets (afaik) are used in evaluation of a position, but not for stateful “strategy”. That is, the overall algorithm has a heuristic evaluation function (potentially incorporating a neural network), and then chooses a move by doing the sort of “future calculation” that humans do, except in fancy ways to make it compute fast.