I'm a rubbish chess player, but I suspect that a chess master sees fewer options than a beginner but sees them deeper.
Im poor at chess Kieth, also but you above makes no rational, logical common sense to me.
The chess master has the years of learning experience that is inclusive of many games and many moves and many potential moves to be made.
A novice chess player sees so much less, however, what I did not make clear before, is that the master also sees the relevant moves for winning or loosing. Thats why they are a master.
So its not just finding many options its finding knowing from experience based set of options, or AI programmed options, which options are more relevant for winning or loosing.
Again even if and AI electronic program can process many more bits of info, those bits are more likely be related to a specific game of this or that or toehr, whereas the human processing is of much more generalized set of options learned from human relatioships with family, dogs, cats, friends, cars, spiders, worms, and all of our body parts and drugs and drug effects etc.