Transcript
TEXT ON SCREEN: A MACHINE HAS TRAINED ITSELF TO BEAT HUMANS AT THE WORLD’S HARDEST GAME.
NARRATION: A Google machine called AlphaGo has begun beating human champions at the ancient Chinese game of “Go.”
The basics are simple: Black versus white. Surrounded stones get captured. Winner controls the most territory.
But then it gets complicated.
DEMIS HASSABIS (CEO GOOGLE DEEPMIND): Go is a very intuitive game. If you ask a great Go player why they played a particular move, sometimes they’ll just tell you it felt right. Another way of viewing the complexity of Go is that the number of possible configurations of the board is more than the number of atoms in the universe.
NARRATION: AlphaGo already beat this guy, the European Go champion. And next it’s taking on the world champion.
ARCHIVAL (CNET):
NEWS REPORT: Google just made one giant leap to outsmarting mankind.
NARRATION: If you’re spooked, it may have more to do with science fiction than fact. After all, we’ve been here before. For much of the 20th century, people touted chess as computer science’s grand challenge.
GURUDUTH S. BANAVAR (VICE PRESIDENT OF COGNITIVE COMPUTING, IBM RESEARCH): It’s one of those tasks that we all thought was impossible for computers to do.
NARRATION: Chess is far less complex than Go, but the number of possible chess games also exceeds the number of atoms in the universe. Brute force calculations can’t solve it.
To have any chance, computers need to narrow the choices down, and in the late 1990s, IBM engineers found a way.
ARCHIVAL (CNN):
NEWS REPORT: The world’s greatest chess player, Gary Kasparov, is once again locked in a battle of brains against the supercomputer called Deep Blue.
MAURICE ASHLEY (CHESS GRANDMASTER): Everybody billed it like this was the Terminator come to potentially take down the humans.
NARRATION: And Kasparov got crushed.
ARCHIVAL (CNN):
NEWS REPORT: Kasparov…has resigned!
NARRATION: AlphaGo is different. It analyzed millions of professional Go games and generated its own strategies, then refined them by playing millions more games against itself. It’s a remarkable achievement, but it’s not one step from this. . .
ARCHIVAL (CLIP FROM THE MOVIE “THE TERMINATOR’):
The Terminator!
PATRICK HENRY WINSTON (PROFESSOR OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND COMPUTER SCIENCE, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY): Every time a computer does some narrow thing better than a person, there’s a temptation to think that it’s all over for us. I suppose it probably happened first when computers could multiply large numbers very fast.
NARRATION: Deep Blue helped fuel advances in parallel computing, financial modeling and data mining. And Alpha Go’s ability to train itself could have even wider applications, but beating humans in a mathematically precise game where all the pieces can be seen is much simpler than the calculating we do in real life, where rules, goals and outcomes are much less clear.
PATRICK HENRY WINSTON: What goes on inside your head is a form of exotic engineering that we just simply don’t understand yet.
DEMIS HASSABIS: It is just one rung on the ladder towards solving artificial intelligence.
(END)
Machine Trains Self to Beat Humans at World’s Hardest Game
The ancient strategy game of Go may have met its ultimate match in Google’s AI.
The brain-taxing board game is a little like an Eastern version of chess, except many times more complex. It has millions of devotees in China, Korea and Japan. Many of them tuned in today to watch an artificial intelligence computer built by Google’s DeepMind beat the world champion, Lee Sedol, in the first of a five-game contest.
Duels like these don’t come often. That’s because the vast majority of human-versus-machine contests are rarely worth watching at all. Either the humans would so obviously win—try getting a machine to write jokes—or we’d so obviously lose. You wouldn’t run a race against a car, or try to out-hammer a steam drill.
But every once in awhile, a technological moment comes when the man-machine match-up gives us a fight worth watching. (Just ask John Henry.) DeepMind vs. Lee Sedol is one of those moments. But as the video above shows, the stakes of this week’s historic battle may not be what you think.
