The following is a conversation with Stuart Russell. He's a professor of computer science at UC

Berkeley and a co-author of a book that introduced me and millions of other people to the amazing world

of AI called Artificial Intelligence and Modern Approach. So it was an honor for me to have this

conversation as part of MIT course and Artificial General Intelligence and the Artificial Intelligence

podcast. If you enjoy it please subscribe on YouTube iTunes or your podcast provider of choice

or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman spelled F-R-I-D. And now here's my

conversation with Stuart Russell.

So you've mentioned in 1975 in high school you've created one of your first AI programs that

played chess. Were you ever able to build a program that beat you at chess or another board game?

So my program never beat me at chess. I actually wrote the program at Imperial College. So I

used to take the bus every Wednesday with a box of cards this big and shove them into the

card reader and they gave us eight seconds of CPU time. It took about five seconds to read the

cards in and compile the code. So we had three seconds of CPU time which was enough to make one move

you know with a not very deep search and then we would print that move out and then we'd have to go

to the back of the queue and wait to feed the cards in again. How deep was the search?

I was talking about one move, two moves. So now I think we got we got an eight move,

eight you know the depth-late with alpha-beta and we had some tricks of our own about

move-ordering and some pruning of the tree but you were still able to beat that program.

Yeah yeah I was a reasonable chess player in my youth. I did an athelo program and a backgammon

so when I got to Berkeley I worked a lot on what we call meta-reasoning which really means

reasoning about reasoning and in the case of a game playing program you need to reason about

what parts of the search tree you're actually going to explore because the search tree is

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