Google's AlphaGo isn't taking over the world, yet - CNET

Not anytime soon, say computer scientists. Despite their fast advances, robots remain too woefully single-minded to give humanity a giant pink slip.

Oren Etzioni, the CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, says teaching computers to read and then answer questions about that content is still a work in progress. For example, when Etzioni had computers read 8th grade science texts, they could answer only about 60 percent of the questions on a test.

"Understanding a single sentence can be a lot more complicated than playing Go," Etzioni says. Computers, he says, have yet to demonstrate that they "can solve fuzzier problems where things are more nuanced."

Go's complexity is what drew Google's artificial intelligence team to it. Facebook is also working on a program that can play the game.

Go, which originated in China thousands of years ago, is played on a 19x19 grid with black and white stones. The board's size means the number of possible moves is greater than the number of atoms in the universe, according to Google, making it a more difficult programming challenge than chess.

Artificial intelligence expert David Levy says Go's complexity makes Google's win a bigger victory than IBM's 1997 triumph over world chess champion Gary Kasparov.

"Singularity is much closer than most people previously thought," said Levy, referring to the mooted moment in computer science when computers outpace humans. Levy has twice won the Loebner Prize, an award for creating the most humanlike computers.

Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, was also impressed by AlphaGo's feat.

"Go is the most important game in my life," Bushnell said. "It's the only game that truly balances the left and right sides of the brain. The fact that it has now yielded to computer technology is massively important."