Historic First Win in Man versus Machine "Go" Match.
VAUSE: Hello everyone. Well, a second of what is likely to be another tense match is underway right now in South Korea between man and computer. But it's not just any computer or any game. On Wednesday, Google's Alpha Go software beat the world champion and legendary Go player, Lee Sedol.</s>VAUSE: Go is an ancient and very difficult Chinese board game. On Wednesday's win, it was a major breakthrough for artificial intelligence.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So, of course, we're very excited about this historic moment and we're very pleased with how Go performed.</s>LEE SEDOL, WORLD CHAMPION "GO" PLAYER (through translation): I was very surprised. I didn't think Alpha Go would play in such a perfect manner. So I was very surprised.</s>SESAY: These are live pictures. It's the second of the best of five matches. It's happening right now in Seoul. It started about three hours ago.</s>VAUSE: I have no idea who's winning. But apparently the goal is to take territorial control of the board.</s>VAUSE: The head of Google's team that develop said Alpha Go says there's more possible configurations than there are atoms in the universe. How they worked that out, I have no idea.</s>SESAY: And very, very confusing.</s>VAUSE: Which is luckily why --</s>SESAY: Richard Korf, a computer science professor at the University of California is here with us in the studio to help make sense of it all. Welcome.</s>RICHARD KORF, COMPUTER SCIENCE PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA: Thank you very much</s>SESAY: First, tell us why Go, this particular game, is seen as such a critical test for A.I., why this moment is being lauded.</s>KORF: It's probably analogous to something that happened about 20 years ago, which was an IBM machine, called Deep Blue, beat Gary Kasparov, the world's human champion at Chess. This is like deja vu for me. The difference between Chess and Go is Go is a much more complicated, difficult game, particularly for computers to play. The standard techniques used for chess, which were so successful in checkers, Chess, Othello, and other games, don't work as well in Go.</s>VAUSE: Because in chess, there's 20 possible moves and Go is 2000. Is that right?</s>KORF: In Chess, there's about 35 possible moves on average. Go is typically 250. And that makes Go more difficult for computers and the standard techniques used for these other games.</s>SESAY: And how did Alpha Go good so good at it? You said before this is a case of a number of breakthroughs.</s>KORF: It's not one particular breakthrough, but it's a tremendous engineering effort combining a lot of developments done in artificial intelligence probably for the last seven years. They put a lot of things together. They learned from human masters. They have a database of an enormous number of Go games where moves were made by human masters and we've learned based on that. They learned also based on self play. Build a program like this, you can have it play against various versions of itself and get better as well. [01:55:]</s>VAUSE: Stephen Hawkins, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, you know the list of people, they've all said that artificial intelligence is an existential threat to humanity. So should we all be worried about this?</s>KORF: Not for the Go program. Most people who say that are not people in the A.I. research community. In my community, people are not as concerned about A.I. taking over the world. Frankly, I'm more concerned with artificial intelligence being used by humans in bad ways, like automatic weapons and drones that are not controlled by people and those sorts of things. Those are a much more dangerous thing to worry about. Myself and most of the people in the field, not all of them, are not particularly concerned about A.I. taking over the world and enslaving us.</s>SESAY: That's the long term. In the short term, what does this moment in time mean for us?</s>KORF: Well, this is a milestone. It's a scientific field that's been around since 1950 and continues to make progress. And this is a milestone. We're going to see more and more A.I. I think one more thing we'll see a lot of is self-driving cars. It will be a tremendous boom to society. It's another example of artificial intelligence.</s>VAUSE: We have to leave it there. Robby the Robot is making my house a little smarter. Thank you.</s>SESAY: Thank you.</s>KORF: You're welcome.</s>VAUSE: You're watching CNN NEWSROOM, live from Los Angeles. I'm John Vause.</s>SESAY: I'm Isha Sesay. The news continues with Errol Barnett right after this.