... Give Fan Lui game access to a data bank like that - which is separate from the "thinking" part of the machine - and see what happens. ...
That probably would make him a less skilled player. Too much data for a human to process.
Go is all about pattern evaluation - the pattern changes with each new "stone" placed on the board. The new AI program is better at this evaluation than most humans, if not all. It got that way by "studying" 30 million patterns that occurred in well played games. Then it advanced its skills by playing modified versions of its self. I. e. It learns in a very limited domain, more than any human can.
There are no instructions on how to play well - no describable rules for the better placement of the next stone. Chess is a simple game to process all possible moves (and those that are possible after each of those moves) but in Go there are more such possibilities in this potential chain of events than atoms in the universe - far beyond the computational powers of any foreseeable computer to exhaustively consider them all - that was possible in chess and how a computer (deepblue) became world champion.
Go is without doubt the most elegant game. Only two or three rules, identical for all pieces (stones) played and once played, the don't move except when captured and removed from the board. Anyone can learn to play it in less than five minutes, but a life time of daily playing is required to play at the highest level.
On nice thing about Go is unequal players can have an equal chance of winning - the weaker one is given a few initial stones on the board to start the game - that does not change the nature of the game significantly as it does in chess, when the better player has one man removed at the start of the game - that is no longer chess, but a chess like game.
As a graduate student I played with a six stone initial advantage against a much better player during our "brown bag" lunches. If I got 7 stones, I had a no-zero chance to win, with only 5 stones at the start I was sure to lose as I normally did even with six stones. As I would usually concede after a couple of dozen stones had been played, we could get more than one game in during the lunch hour when I had 6 stones at the start. He was hoping to, in a year or so, to get to be officially ranked, at the bottom of a very long ranking ladder.