Stuart Russell

But I do need to realize, okay, I better finish this before the shops close because I don't have any food at home.

So there's some weak connection, but not in the way that chess works where everything is tied into a single stream of thought.

So the thought was that Go, to solve Go, would have to make progress on stuff that would be useful for the real world.

And in a way, AlphaGo is a little bit disappointing.

Right.

Because the program design for AlphaGo was actually not that different from Deep Blue or even from Arthur Samuel's checker playing program from the 1950s.

And in fact, the two things that make AlphaGo work is one is this amazing ability to evaluate the positions, and the other is the meta-reasoning capability, which allows it to explore some paths in the tree very deeply and to abandon other paths very quickly.

a winter and so it do you think it re-emerges oh so i i would say yeah it's not quite as simple as that so the the ai winter the first winter that was actually named as such was the one in the late 80s and that came about because uh in the mid 80s there was a

really a concerted attempt to push AI out into the real world using what was called expert system technology.

And for the most part, that technology was just not ready for prime time.

They were trying, in many cases, to do a form of uncertain reasoning, judgment, combinations of evidence, diagnosis, those kinds of things.

which was simply invalid.

And when you try to apply invalid reasoning methods to real problems, you can fudge it for small versions of the problem, but when it starts to get larger, the thing just falls apart.

So many companies found that the stuff just didn't work, and they were spending tons of money on consultants to try to make it work.

And

There were other practical reasons, like they were asking the companies to buy incredibly expensive

Lisp machine workstations, which were literally between $50,000 and $100,000 in 1980s money, which would be like between $150,000 and $300,000 per workstation in current prices.

Yeah.

In many cases.

I think there were some successes.