The Birth of Artificial Intelligence

The birth of Artificial Intelligence (the science of creating computational systems with simulated intelligent), can be traced back to the early 1950, research into the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI for short) has not as yet created anything like the systems seen in Hollywood productions like the Hal 9000.Alan Turings paper entitled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" is widely believed to be the first significant event in the field.Turing argued that if a machine could pass what is now known as a 'Turing test' it could be considered to be intelligent.The Turing test as originally specified, centres on computational ability to perform a social role. Designed to determine if a system meant to generate human-scale performance is totally indistinguishable from a human's (offered it as a replacement for the question, "Can machines think?") where by a range of people hold written conversations with an unseen correspondent; if identification is less than chance then the machine has passed.A system known as LOGIC THEORIST (a system which discovered proofs to theories in symbolic logic) was demonstrated at a conference called "The Dartmouth Summer research Project on Artificial Intelligence", which is believed to be when this subset of computer science was conceived. A number of other systems which also exhibited apparent intelligent followed Newell’s and Simon’s Physical Symbol Systems Hypothesis,Despite such early successes, there have been a number of problems which AI research, so as yet there is no HAL 9000 and realistically, it will be a good while before such systems become available, if indeed they ever prove to be possible at all.The point can be illustrated by considering the case of ELlZA which was supposed to emulate a psychotherapist. ELIZA can be quite impressive, however, it becomes clear very quickly that it is a process of pure stimulus-response replies to the preceding message.Simon’s dream of a computer that could beat a human chess champion was accomplished, by the De~ Blue system. Notwithstanding such advances, not everybody accepts the AI researchers presumptions about the world and minds and from time to time critics argue on a variety of grounds that AI is doomed to failure.There have been a number of responses to the problem of common sense knowledge within the AI research. These include designing systems to operate in limited domains and developing a large computational database and search tools which enables AI systems.Another problem which AI research is related to lack of cognitive ability which prevents AI systems from being able to adapt to new situations that is being overcome by the machine learning strategy which is hoped to solve the common sense knowledge problem which amounts to the fact that a computational system only knows what it has been explicitly told and thus can not infer the most trivial item of information.Whatever the case, there have been two important sets of consequences produced by AI research. The first of these has been the birth of anew academic discipline which has come to be know as 'Cognitive Science'. The second is the introduction of a fundamental level of intelligence into systems around today which make use of the fruits of AI research.I am the website administrator of the Wandle Industrial Museum (http://www.wandle.org). Established in 1983 by local people determined to ensure that the history of the valley was no longer neglected but enhanced awareness its heritage for the use and benefits of the community.

Michael Hart