History of AI
In the mid-1950s John McCarthy coined the term “Artificial Intelligence”, later abbreviated to AI. The definition is simple; “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.”
John McCarthy, Marvin L. Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude E. Shannon, A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, August 31, 1955
The Father(s) of
Artificial Intelligence
In the summer of 1956, McCarthy presented his research at a conference on Dartmouth’s Campus. One member of this Dartmouth Conference was Marvin Minskey, a fellow computer scientist. Minsky worked with McCarthy and co-founded MIT's AI laboratory in the late 50s. Almost a decade later Minksy would go on to win the Turing Award, the most prestigious award in computer science. The Turing Award is named after a very famous mathematician and computer scientist, Alan Turing. While not always considered a founder of AI, Turing worked extensively to provide the concepts of algorithms and computations that have led to the creation of general-purpose computers. He also worked under the Official Secrets Act during World War II, contributing greatly to the victory of the Allied Powers.
Developing artificial intelligence was not simple, nor was it done by a few individuals. Claude Shannon, author of A Mathematical Theory of Communication, played a major role in helping develop natural language processing and computational linguistics. These steps were vital toward developing AI programs. Two of the earliest programs were the Logic Theorist. Creators of these programs, Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon recognized that if a machine could manipulate numbers, it could also manipulate symbols and that manipulation of symbols may very well be the same as human thought.
The Logic Theorist
This computer program, written in 1956, would prove itself to be the first program deliberately engineered to perform automated reasoning. The machine was able to prove 38 of the first 52 theorems found in Principia Mathematica, finding new and more elegant proofs for some theorems.
The Logic Theorist used a search tree method, where the root was the hypothesis and each branch was a deduction based on rules of logic. Somewhere in the branches was the goal, or the proposition that the program intended to prove. The pathway that led from the root to the goal was the series of statements that created the proof.
REASONING AS SEARCH
This is an approach to problem solving that uses calculated guesses based on previous experiences. This was important and still helps today to overcome the combinatorial explosion of exponentially growing searches.
HEURISTICS
In order to implement this program on a computer, there would need to become a programming language. IPL, was the language that was used to implement Logic Theorist; another popular program is Lisp, created by McCarthy later on.
LIST PROCESSING
Pamela McCorduck, an American Journalist, would go on to write that this machine was “proof positive that a machine could perform tasks heretofore considered intelligent, creative, and uniquely human.” Simon stated “ (We) invented a computer program capable of thinking non-numerically and thereby solved the venerable mind-body problem, explaining how a system composed of matter can have the properties of mind.” At this point, it seemed that machines do indeed have minds, just like humans do.
Is AI even popular?
At the beginning of the 1970s a brick wall stopped the development of new and exciting AI. Composed of various issues, the wall consisted mostly due to the lack of computational power. Computers were simply not good enough, they couldn’t store enough information or process it fast enough. As exciting as AI was, our computational technology just wasn’t ready to handle it, leading to a decrease in funding and research.
In the 1980s there was a small revival of AI as a result of expanding the algorithmic toolkit and a boost of funding. The Japanese government heavily funded expert systems, a program that mimicked the decision making process of a human expert. They invested $400 million dollars into their Fifth Generation Computer Project, with ambitious goals that were never met, causing AI to fall out of the spotlight again.
At the turn of the century, AI was ramping up steam again. In 1997, the current world chess champion Gary Kasparov was defeated by Deep Blue, IBM’s chess playing program, and served as a huge step towards recognizing the legitimacy of AI programs. Moore’s Law, which tells us that the memory and speed of computers essentially doubles every year, finally allowed our computers to catch up to the ambitious goals of AI.