As John McCarthy said – artificial intelligence is the science and engineering of making not just ordinary machines, but intelligent ones, and most especially, intelligent computer programs.
Before we getting to the history of artificial intelligence Initially, we were concerned about getting things done using partly human and partly machine. From there, we moved to increasing computer capability by reducing computer sizes. We didn’t stop there as well. We advanced ourselves by activating the age of super-computers that can be configured to do multiple tasks on our command. With the super-computers, we are computing intelligence to allow them function tremendously, activating their neurons (connectivity) to reason, analyze and even decide on data available to them. Truly, this is the age of artificial intelligence.
What is the history of artificial intelligence?
Like it is being said, “there is absolutely no new thing under the heaven.” This is true in all ramification. Data is being collected far back as in the ancient years, so, is the reign of artificial intelligence. We are not suddenly having artificial intelligence with us, rather, it has been in manifestation through series of study, research and experimentation.
About 100 years ago our artificial intelligence research, and experimentation kicked off.
Notably, artificial intelligence began with the 1920 fictional play of Karel Capek – a Czech writer. This play was titled Rossumovi Univerzalni Roboti – called Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R). The term ‘robot’ originated from this play of Karel Capek.
The play was about a robotics factory that made artificial humans whom they referred to as robots. In the R.U.R, the robots created are living beings similar to what today we refer to as ‘clones.’ The robots in the play worked for humans until rebellion from the robots occurred which eventually led to human extinction.
It was really an interesting story as it helped find the name for man-made creatures called robots and from the play stemmed the research into artificial intelligence which is the stronghold of technology in our world today.
Turing machine was another notable history of artificial intelligence. Turing machine was from the name of Alan Turing. He was an intelligent scientist and researcher whose theory of computation is still studied today in the field of computer science. Every scientist must necessarily come across Alan Turing’s theory of computation. An interesting work of Alan Turing was the encrypted code of enigma used by Nazi Germany in communicating during the world war.
The Turing machine was an abstract machine that could compute logic of any algorithm. Alan Turing presented his theoretical idea in the Turing machine model. The machine could solve logical algorithm problems efficiently.
Later in the years after the World War 2, the Turing test was introduced, and the goal was to define intelligence in machines. How this is done is that, a machine is intelligent if two machines communicates through a natural language while another third machine cannot detect which machine is the communicator among st the two machines.
The research discoveries in areas of Cybernetics, neurology, and information theory as well as some other supporting researches helped confirm the possibility of building electronic brain – an ideal artificial intelligence machine brain.
