Artificial Intelligence: History, Concepts, and the Future

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

"What if these theories are really true, and we were magically shrunk and put into someone's brain while he was thinking. We would see all the pumps, pistons, gears and levers working away, and we would be able to describe their workings completely, in mechanical terms, thereby completely describing the thought processes of the brain. But that description would nowhere contain any mention of thought! It would contain nothing but descriptions of pumps, pistons, levers!"

— Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1679)

Not even a century ago — in fact, not even a half-century ago — few people could have imagined the present-day world with computers operating most government and business processes and the Internet running in millions of homes. Thus it would have been nearly impossible to comprehend artificial intelligence (AI) and the idea that scientists would try to create a machine capable of learning, adapting, reasoning, and correcting or improving itself. Whether or not this will become a reality is still unknown.

AI pioneer Chris Langton says that this "intelligent entity" will never be possible. He believes that "when scientists are faced with the choice of either admitting that the computer process is alive, or moving the goalposts to exclude the computer from the exclusive club of living organisms, they will choose the latter." Is this true? Will humans never admit that a computer can actually function as real life? Or will they instead decide there is nothing special about life, and that humanity can therefore be designed, built, and replicated? At least for the time being, there is no answer to this dilemma.

According to the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, AI is "the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines." The evolution of this science became notable as early as 1821, when Charles Babbage stared at a table of logarithms and said, "I think that all these tables might be calculated by machinery." From that point on, he devoted his life to developing the first programmable computer.

Origins and Early Milestones

Much later, in 1943, Babbage's idea finally took hold when Warren McCulloch — a psychiatrist, cybernetician, philosopher, and poet — and Walter Pitts, a research student in mathematics, published an innovative paper combining early twentieth-century ideas on computation, logic, and the nervous system. The report promised to revolutionize both psychology and philosophy. The following year, those ideas were applied to develop the first American programmable computer, the Merck I.

It did not take long for British scientist Alan Turing to recognize the similarity between the computational process and human thinking. In his paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," he outlined the direction for the remainder of the century: developing computers for game playing, decision-making, natural language understanding, translation, theorem proving, and encryption code cracking.

In the 1950s, Newell, Shaw, and Simon created the program Logic Theorist (later called General Problem Solver), which used recursive search techniques — defining a solution in terms of itself. IBM developed the first program capable of playing a full game of chess in 1957. The following year, Newell, Shaw, and Simon observed: "There are now in the world machines that think, that learn and that create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until — in a visible future — the range of problems they can handle will be co-extensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied" (Simon, p. 3).

References

Copeland, B. J. (2000). What is AI? Retrieved May 21, 2004, from http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/Reference%20Articles/what_is_AI/What%20is%20AI07.html

Freeman, D. (1990). Common sense and the computer. Discover, 11, 64–71.

Gershenfeld, N. (1999). When things start to think. New York: Henry Holt.

Kurzweil, R. (1999). Age of spiritual machines. New York: Penguin Press.

Leibniz, G. W. F. von (1969). On the general characteristic. In L. E. Loemmker (Ed.), Leibniz: Philosophical papers and letters. Boston: Reidel.

Martin, J. (2000). Alien intelligence. Washington, D.C.: Capital Press.

Simon, H., & Newell, A. (1958). Heuristic problem solving: The next advance in operations research. Operations Research, 6, 1–10.

Ward, M. (1999). Virtual organisms. New York: Thomas Dunne.