A history of AI; key moments in the story of Artifical Intelligence
AI is the word of the moment, or is that acronym of the moment? But where did the idea come from? We track key moments, discoveries and ideas in the history of AI
The history of AI begins with a myth and just as with many modern AI systems, it concerned defence. According to Greek mythology, Talos was a giant automaton made of bronze, created by the god Hephaestus, for the purpose of guarding the island of Crete by throwing stones at passing ships.
Just as many experts in AI today accuse companies of claiming to have AI when in fact they don’t, the second well known example of AI was a lie. The Turk was supposed to be a mechanical device for playing chess, created by Wolfgang von Kempelen, trying to impress Empress Maria Theresa of Austria in 1769. The Turk even played against Napoleon Bonaparte and won. But in fact it was a hoax. A human chess master sat inside the machine, controlling it.
In the 1830s, Charles Babbage created a design for the Analytical Engine. The product was finally built 153 years later. It wasn’t a design for an AI machine, of course, but today is considered to be the forerunner of the digital computer.
In this year, Vannevar Bush wrote an essay, published in The Atlantic, entitled ‘As we may think’. The idea was for a machine that holds a kind of collective memory, that provided knowledge. Bush believed that the big hope for humanity lied in supporting greater knowledge, rather than information.
John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, with support from colleague William Shockley, demonstrate the transistor at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.
Alan Turing proposes a test for ascertaining whether a computer can think like a human. In that year he published a paper: ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence.’ Turing test was based on the imitation game in which a judge questions a human and a computer in different rooms, communicating by keyboard and monitor. The judge has to identify which of the two is human. This has become known as ‘The Turing Test.’
Marvin Minsky builds the first randomly wired neural network learning machine. Later in life, Minsky’s whose contributions to AI are legion, said: “No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it’s doing; but most of the time, we aren’t either.
