Comment by jebarker

Indeed. To get "aesthetic" play you would have to mimic real human play for an interesting reason: the space of possible Go configurations and games is so mind-bogglingly vast that all of human history has only ever seen a infinitesimal sample. So any sense of aesthetics is just a consequence of chance and memetics. AlphaZero is effectively exploring a new branch of Go history so its aesthetics are completely different. Although maybe that just shows that the idea of aesthetics here isn't very meaningful.