I’m not saying it’s not based upon math and programming, I’m saying that building a modern AI to play Go is not a mathematical / programmer approach to playing Go. Our brains function through electrical impulses flowing between neurons, but that doesn’t make an electrician an expert in psychology (nor in programming).
There’s a difference between the two things. An AI is a computer program (duh), but the way it plays go has nothing to do with programming.
As for what I would actually consider a mathematical approach to Go, it is more along the lines of this type of thinking