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The history of artificial intelligence (AI) began in antiquity, with myths, stories and rumors of artificial beings endowed with intelligence or consciousness by master craftsmen. The seeds of modern AI were planted by philosophers who attempted to describe the process of human thinking as the mechanical manipulation of symbols.This work culminated in the invention of the programmable digital computer in the 1940s, a machine based on the abstract essence of mathematical reasoning. This device and the ideas behind it inspired a handful of scientists to begin seriously discussing the possibility of building an electronic brain.
The field of AI research was founded at a
workshop
Beginning with the Industrial Revolution era, a workshop may be a room, rooms or building which provides both the area and tools (or machinery) that may be required for the manufacture or repair of manufactured goods. Workshops were the on ...
held on the campus of Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native ...
, USA during the summer of 1956. Those who attended would become the leaders of AI research for decades. Many of them predicted that a machine as intelligent as a human being would exist in no more than a generation, and they were given millions of dollars to make this vision come true.
Eventually, it became obvious that commercial developers and researchers had grossly underestimated the difficulty of the project. In 1974, in response to the criticism from James Lighthill
Sir Michael James Lighthill (23 January 1924 – 17 July 1998) was a British applied mathematician, known for his pioneering work in the field of aeroacoustics and for writing the Lighthill report on artificial intelligence.
Biography
J ...
and ongoing pressure from congress, the U.S.
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...
and British Governments stopped funding undirected research into artificial intelligence, and the difficult years that followed would later be known as an "AI winter
In the history of artificial intelligence, an AI winter is a period of reduced funding and interest in artificial intelligence research.Japanese Government inspired governments and industry to provide AI with billions of dollars, but by the late 80s the investors became disillusioned and withdrew funding again.
Investment and interest in AI boomed in the first decades of the 21st century when
In ''Of the Nature of Things'', written by the Swiss-born alchemist, Paracelsus, he describes a procedure which he claims can fabricate an "artificial man". By placing the "sperm of a man" in horse dung, and feeding it the "Arcanum of Mans blood" after 40 days, the concoction will become a living infant. ''
Realistic humanoid
In the 17th century, 
Their answer was surprising in two ways. First, they proved that there were, in fact, limits to what mathematical logic could accomplish. But second (and more important for AI) their work suggested that, within these limits, ''any'' form of mathematical reasoning could be mechanized. The Church-Turing thesis implied that a mechanical device, shuffling symbols as simple as 0 and 1, could imitate any conceivable process of mathematical deduction. The key insight was the
In the 1940s and 50s, a handful of scientists from a variety of fields (mathematics, psychology, engineering, economics and political science) began to discuss the possibility of creating an artificial brain. The field of
machine learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence.
Machine ...
was successfully applied to many problems in academia and industry due to new methods, the application of powerful computer hardware, and the collection of immense data sets.
Precursors
Mythical, fictional, and speculative precursors
Myth and legend
In Greek Mythology,Talos
In Greek mythology, Talos — also spelled Talus (; el, Τάλως, ''Tálōs'') or Talon (; el, Τάλων, ''Tálōn'') — was a giant automaton made of bronze to protect Europa in Crete from pirates and invaders. He circled the island's sh ...
was a giant constructed of bronze who acted as guardian for the island of Crete. He would throw boulders at the ships of invaders, and would complete 3 circuits around the island's perimeter daily. According to pseudo-Apollodorus
The ''Bibliotheca'' (Ancient Greek: grc, Βιβλιοθήκη, lit=Library, translit=Bibliothēkē, label=none), also known as the ''Bibliotheca'' of Pseudo-Apollodorus, is a compendium of Greek myths and heroic legends, arranged in three book ...
' '' Bibliotheke'', Hephaestus forged Talos
In Greek mythology, Talos — also spelled Talus (; el, Τάλως, ''Tálōs'') or Talon (; el, Τάλων, ''Tálōn'') — was a giant automaton made of bronze to protect Europa in Crete from pirates and invaders. He circled the island's sh ...
with the aid of a cyclops and presented the automaton as a gift to Minos. In the Argonautica
The ''Argonautica'' ( el, Ἀργοναυτικά , translit=Argonautika) is a Greek epic poem written by Apollonius Rhodius in the 3rd century BC. The only surviving Hellenistic epic, the ''Argonautica'' tells the myth of the voyage of Jason ...
, Jason
Jason ( ; ) was an ancient Greek mythological hero and leader of the Argonauts, whose quest for the Golden Fleece featured in Greek literature. He was the son of Aeson, the rightful king of Iolcos. He was married to the sorceress Medea. He ...
and the Argonauts defeated him by way of a single plug near his foot which, once removed, allowed the vital ichor
In Greek mythology, ichor () is the ethereal fluid that is the blood of the gods and/or immortals. The Ancient Greek word () is of uncertain etymology, and has been suggested to be a foreign word.
In classical myth
Ichor originates in Greek ...
to flow out from his body and left him inanimate.
Pygmalion
Pygmalion or Pigmalion may refer to:
Mythology
* Pygmalion (mythology), a sculptor who fell in love with his statue
Stage
* ''Pigmalion'' (opera), a 1745 opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau
* ''Pygmalion'' (Rousseau), a 1762 melodrama by Jean-Jacques ...
was a legendary king and sculptor of Greek Mythology, famously represented in Ovid’s ''Metamorphoses
The ''Metamorphoses'' ( la, Metamorphōsēs, from grc, μεταμορφώσεις: "Transformations") is a Latin narrative poem from 8 CE by the Roman poet Ovid. It is considered his ''magnum opus''. The poem chronicles the history of the ...
''. In the 10th book of Ovid’s narrative poem, Pygmalion
Pygmalion or Pigmalion may refer to:
Mythology
* Pygmalion (mythology), a sculptor who fell in love with his statue
Stage
* ''Pigmalion'' (opera), a 1745 opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau
* ''Pygmalion'' (Rousseau), a 1762 melodrama by Jean-Jacques ...
becomes disgusted with women when he witnesses the way in which the Propoetides
In Greco-Roman mythology, the Propoetides (Ancient Greek: Προποιτίδες) are the daughters of Propoetus from the city of Amathus on the island of Cyprus.
Mythology
In Roman literature, they are treated by Ovid in his ''Metamorphose ...
prostitute themselves. Despite this, he makes offerings at the temple of Venus asking the goddess to bring to him a woman just like a statue he carved. The earliest written account regarding golem-making is found in the writings of Eleazar ben Judah of Worms circa 12–13th century. During the Middle Ages, it was believed that the animation of a Golem
A golem ( ; he, , gōlem) is an animated, Anthropomorphism, anthropomorphic being in Jewish folklore, which is entirely created from inanimate matter (usually clay or mud). The most famous golem narrative involves Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the l ...
could be achieved by insertion of a piece of paper with any of God’s names on it, into the mouth of the clay figure. Unlike legendary automata like Brazen Heads, a Golem
A golem ( ; he, , gōlem) is an animated, Anthropomorphism, anthropomorphic being in Jewish folklore, which is entirely created from inanimate matter (usually clay or mud). The most famous golem narrative involves Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the l ...
was unable to speak.
Alchemical means of artificial intelligence
In ''Of the Nature of Things'', written by the Swiss-born alchemist, Paracelsus, he describes a procedure which he claims can fabricate an "artificial man". By placing the "sperm of a man" in horse dung, and feeding it the "Arcanum of Mans blood" after 40 days, the concoction will become a living infant. ''Takwin
Takwin ( ar, تكوين) was a goal of certain Muslim alchemists, notably Jabir ibn Hayyan. In the alchemical context, takwin refers to the creation of synthetic life in the laboratory, up to and including human life. Whether Jabir meant this goa ...
'', the artificial creation of life, was a frequent topic of Ismaili alchemical manuscripts, especially those attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan
Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Ḥayyān (Arabic: , variously called al-Ṣūfī, al-Azdī, al-Kūfī, or al-Ṭūsī), died 806−816, is the purported author of an enormous number and variety of works in Arabic, often called the Jabirian corpus. The ...
. Islamic alchemists attempted to create a broad range of life through their work, ranging from plants to animals. In Faust, The Second Part of the Tragedy by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. His works include plays, poetry, literature, and aesthetic criticism, as well as t ...
, an alchemically fabricated Homunculus, destined to live forever in the flask in which he was made, endeavors to be born into a full human body. Upon the initiation of this transformation, however, the flask shatters and the Homunculus dies.
Modern fiction
By the 19th century, ideas about artificial men and thinking machines were developed in fiction, as inMary Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (; ; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel '' Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus'' (1818), which is considered an early example of science fiction. She also ...
's ''Frankenstein
''Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus'' is an 1818 novel written by English author Mary Shelley. ''Frankenstein'' tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific ...
'' or Karel Čapek
Karel Čapek (; 9 January 1890 – 25 December 1938) was a Czech writer, playwright and critic. He has become best known for his science fiction, including his novel '' War with the Newts'' (1936) and play '' R.U.R.'' (''Rossum's Universal ...
's ''R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)
''R.U.R.'' is a 1920 science-fiction play by the Czech writer Karel Čapek. "R.U.R." stands for (Rossum's Universal Robots, a phrase that has been used as a subtitle in English versions). The play had its world premiere on 2 January 1921 in H ...
'',
and speculation, such as Samuel Butler's "Darwin among the Machines
"Darwin among the Machines" is an article published in ''The Press'' newspaper on 13 June 1863 in Christchurch, New Zealand, which references the work of Charles Darwin in the title. Written by Samuel Butler but signed '' Cellarius'' (q.v.), the ...
," and in real world instances, including Edgar Allan Poe's " Maelzel's Chess Player".
AI has become a regular topic of science fiction through the present.
Automata
Realistic humanoid automata
An automaton (; plural: automata or automatons) is a relatively self-operating machine, or control mechanism designed to automatically follow a sequence of operations, or respond to predetermined instructions.Automaton – Definition and More ...
were built by craftsman from every civilization, including Yan Shi
Yan may refer to:
Chinese states
* Yan (state) (11th century – 222 BC), a major state in northern China during the Zhou dynasty
* Yan (Han dynasty kingdom), first appearing in 206 BC
* Yan (Three Kingdoms kingdom), officially claimed inde ...
,
Hero of Alexandria
Hero of Alexandria (; grc-gre, Ἥρων ὁ Ἀλεξανδρεύς, ''Heron ho Alexandreus'', also known as Heron of Alexandria ; 60 AD) was a Greek mathematician and engineer who was active in his native city of Alexandria, Roman Egypt. He ...
,
Al-Jazari,
Pierre Jaquet-Droz
Pierre Jaquet-Droz (; 1721–1790) was a watchmaker of the late eighteenth century. He was born on 28 July 1721 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, in the Principality of Neuchâtel, which was then part of the Kingdom of Prussia. He lived in Paris, London, and ...
, and Wolfgang von Kempelen
Johann Wolfgang Ritter von Kempelen de Pázmánd ( hu, Kempelen Farkas; 23 January 1734 – 26 March 1804) was a Hungarian author and inventor, known for his chess-playing "automaton" hoax The Turk and for his speaking machine.
Personal lif ...
.
The oldest known automata were the sacred statues of ancient Egypt and Greece
Greece,, or , romanized: ', officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the southern tip of the Balkans, and is located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Greece shares land borders ...
. The faithful believed that craftsman had imbued these figures with very real minds, capable of wisdom and emotion—Hermes Trismegistus
Hermes Trismegistus (from grc, Ἑρμῆς ὁ Τρισμέγιστος, "Hermes the Thrice-Greatest"; Classical Latin: la, label=none, Mercurius ter Maximus) is a legendary Hellenistic figure that originated as a syncretic combination of t ...
wrote that "by discovering the true nature of the gods, man has been able to reproduce it."
During the early modern period, these legendary automata were said to possess the magical ability to answer questions put to them. The late medieval alchemist and scholar Roger Bacon was purported to have fabricated a brazen head, having developed a legend of having been a wizard. These legends were similar to the Norse myth of the Head of Mímir. According to legend, Mímir was known for his intellect and wisdom, and was beheaded in the Æsir-Vanir War. Odin is said to have "embalmed" the head with herbs and spoke incantations over it such that Mímir’s head remained able to speak wisdom to Odin. Odin then kept the head near him for counsel.
Formal reasoning
Artificial intelligence is based on the assumption that the process of human thought can be mechanized. The study of mechanical—or "formal"—reasoning has a long history.Chinese
Chinese can refer to:
* Something related to China
* Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity
**''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation
** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...
, Indian
Indian or Indians may refer to:
Peoples South Asia
* Indian people, people of Indian nationality, or people who have an Indian ancestor
** Non-resident Indian, a citizen of India who has temporarily emigrated to another country
* South Asia ...
and Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
philosophers all developed structured methods of formal deduction in the first millennium BCE. Their ideas were developed over the centuries by philosophers such as Aristotle
Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of ph ...
(who gave a formal analysis of the syllogism), Euclid
Euclid (; grc-gre, Εὐκλείδης; BC) was an ancient Greek mathematician active as a geometer and logician. Considered the "father of geometry", he is chiefly known for the '' Elements'' treatise, which established the foundations of ...
(whose '' Elements'' was a model of formal reasoning), al-Khwārizmī
Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī ( ar, محمد بن موسى الخوارزمي, Muḥammad ibn Musā al-Khwārazmi; ), or al-Khwarizmi, was a Persian polymath from Khwarazm, who produced vastly influential works in mathematics, astronom ...
(who developed algebra
Algebra () is one of the broad areas of mathematics. Roughly speaking, algebra is the study of mathematical symbols and the rules for manipulating these symbols in formulas; it is a unifying thread of almost all of mathematics.
Elementary ...
and gave his name to "algorithm
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...
") and European scholastic philosophers such as William of Ockham
William of Ockham, OFM (; also Occam, from la, Gulielmus Occamus; 1287 – 10 April 1347) was an English Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopher, apologist, and Catholic theologian, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small vil ...
and Duns Scotus
John Duns Scotus ( – 8 November 1308), commonly called Duns Scotus ( ; ; "Duns the Scot"), was a Scottish Catholic priest and Franciscan friar, university professor, philosopher, and theologian. He is one of the four most important ...
.
Spanish philosopher Ramon Llull (1232–1315) developed several ''logical machines'' devoted to the production of knowledge by logical means; Llull described his machines as mechanical entities that could combine basic and undeniable truths by simple logical operations, produced by the machine by mechanical meanings, in such ways as to produce all the possible knowledge. Llull's work had a great influence on Gottfried Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz . ( – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathem ...
, who redeveloped his ideas.
In the 17th century, Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz . ( – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of ma ...
, Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes ( ; 5/15 April 1588 – 4/14 December 1679) was an English philosopher, considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book ''Leviathan'', in which he expounds an influ ...
and René Descartes
René Descartes ( or ; ; Latinized: Renatus Cartesius; 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. Ma ...
explored the possibility that all rational thought could be made as systematic as algebra or geometry. Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes ( ; 5/15 April 1588 – 4/14 December 1679) was an English philosopher, considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book ''Leviathan'', in which he expounds an influe ...
famously wrote in ''Leviathan'': "reason is nothing but reckoning". Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz . ( – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of ma ...
envisioned a universal language of reasoning, the ''characteristica universalis
The Latin term ''characteristica universalis'', commonly interpreted as ''universal characteristic'', or ''universal character'' in English, is a universal and formal language imagined by Gottfried Leibniz able to express mathematical, scienti ...
'', which would reduce argumentation to calculation so that "there would be no more need of disputation between two philosophers than between two accountants. For it would suffice to take their pencils in hand, down to their slates, and to say each other (with a friend as witness, if they liked): ''Let us calculate''." These philosophers had begun to articulate the physical symbol system
A physical symbol system (also called a formal system) takes physical patterns (symbols), combining them into structures (expressions) and manipulating them (using processes) to produce new expressions.
The physical symbol system hypothesis (PSSH ...
hypothesis that would become the guiding faith of AI research.
In the 20th century, the study of mathematical logic
Mathematical logic is the study of formal logic within mathematics. Major subareas include model theory, proof theory, set theory, and recursion theory. Research in mathematical logic commonly addresses the mathematical properties of formal ...
provided the essential breakthrough that made artificial intelligence seem plausible. The foundations had been set by such works as Boole's ''The Laws of Thought
''An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities'' by George Boole, published in 1854, is the second of Boole's two monographs on algebraic logic. Boole was a professor of mathem ...
'' and Frege
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (; ; 8 November 1848 – 26 July 1925) was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic ph ...
's ''Begriffsschrift
''Begriffsschrift'' (German for, roughly, "concept-script") is a book on logic by Gottlob Frege, published in 1879, and the formal system set out in that book.
''Begriffsschrift'' is usually translated as ''concept writing'' or ''concept notatio ...
''. Building on Frege
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (; ; 8 November 1848 – 26 July 1925) was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic ph ...
's system, Russell and Whitehead presented a formal treatment of the foundations of mathematics in their masterpiece, the ''Principia Mathematica
The ''Principia Mathematica'' (often abbreviated ''PM'') is a three-volume work on the foundations of mathematics written by mathematician–philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell and published in 1910, 1912, and 1913. ...
'' in 1913. Inspired by Russell's success, David Hilbert challenged mathematicians of the 1920s and 30s to answer this fundamental question: "can all of mathematical reasoning be formalized?"
His question was answered by Gödel's incompleteness proof, Turing
Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical co ...
's machine and Church
Church may refer to:
Religion
* Church (building), a building for Christian religious activities
* Church (congregation), a local congregation of a Christian denomination
* Church service, a formalized period of Christian communal worship
* C ...
's Lambda calculus.
Their answer was surprising in two ways. First, they proved that there were, in fact, limits to what mathematical logic could accomplish. But second (and more important for AI) their work suggested that, within these limits, ''any'' form of mathematical reasoning could be mechanized. The Church-Turing thesis implied that a mechanical device, shuffling symbols as simple as 0 and 1, could imitate any conceivable process of mathematical deduction. The key insight was the Turing machine
A Turing machine is a mathematical model of computation describing an abstract machine that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite the model's simplicity, it is capable of implementing any computer algori ...
—a simple theoretical construct that captured the essence of abstract symbol manipulation. This invention would inspire a handful of scientists to begin discussing the possibility of thinking machines.
Computer science
Calculating machines were built in antiquity and improved throughout history by many mathematicians, including (once again) philosopherGottfried Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz . ( – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathem ...
. In the early 19th century, Charles Babbage designed a programmable computer (the Analytical Engine), although it was never built. Ada Lovelace speculated that the machine "might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent". (She is often credited as the first programmer because of a set of notes she wrote that completely detail a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers
In mathematics, the Bernoulli numbers are a sequence of rational numbers which occur frequently in analysis. The Bernoulli numbers appear in (and can be defined by) the Taylor series expansions of the tangent and hyperbolic tangent functions, ...
with the Engine.)
Following Babbage, although at first unaware of his earlier work, was Percy Ludgate
Percy Edwin Ludgate (2 August 1883 – 16 October 1922) was an Irish amateur scientist who designed the second analytical engine (general-purpose Turing-complete computer) in history.
Life
Ludgate was born on 2 August 1883 in Skibbereen, ...
, a clerk to a corn merchant in Dublin, Ireland. He independently designed a programmable mechanical computer, which he described in a work that was published in 1909.
Two other inventors, Leonardo Torres y Quevedo
Leonardo Torres y Quevedo (; 28 December 1852 – 18 December 1936) was a Spanish civil engineer and mathematician of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Torres was a pioneer in the development of the radio control and automated ...
and Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all warti ...
, also did follow on research based on Babbage's work.
In his ''Essays on Automatics'' (1913) Torres designed a Babbage type of calculating machine that used electromechanical parts which included floating point number
In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic that represents real numbers approximately, using an integer with a fixed precision, called the significand, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base. For example, 12.345 can be r ...
representations and built a prototype in 1920. Torres is also known for having built in 1912 an autonomous machine capable of playing chess, '' El Ajedrecista''. As opposed to the human-operated The Turk and Ajeeb
Ajeeb was a chess-playing "automaton", created by Charles Hooper (a cabinet maker), first presented at the Royal Polytechnical Institute in 1868. A particularly intriguing piece of faux mechanical technology (while presented as entirely automat ...
, ''El Ajedrecista'' (The Chessplayer) was a true automaton which could play chess without human guidance. It only played an endgame
Endgame, Endgames, End Game, End Games, or similar variations may refer to:
Film
* ''The End of the Game'' (1919 film)
* ''The End of the Game'' (1975 film), short documentary U.S. film
* ''Endgame'' (1983 film), 1983 Italian post-apocalyptic f ...
with three chess pieces, automatically moving a white king
King is the title given to a male monarch in a variety of contexts. The female equivalent is queen, which title is also given to the consort of a king.
*In the context of prehistory, antiquity and contemporary indigenous peoples, the tit ...
and a rook
Rook (''Corvus frugilegus'') is a bird of the corvid family. Rook or rooks may also refer to:
Games
*Rook (chess), a piece in chess
*Rook (card game), a trick-taking card game
Military
* Sukhoi Su-25 or Rook, a close air support aircraft
* USS ...
to checkmate the black king moved by a human opponent.
Vannevar Bush's paper ''Instrumental Analysis'' (1936) discussed using existing IBM punch card machines to implement Babbage's design. In the same year he started the Rapid Arithmetical Machine project to investigate the problems of constructing an electronic digital computer.
The first modern computers were the massive code breaking machines of the Second World War
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...
(such as Z3, ENIAC
ENIAC (; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945. There were other computers that had these features, but the ENIAC had all of them in one pac ...
and Colossus
Colossus, Colossos, or the plural Colossi or Colossuses, may refer to:
Statues
* Any exceptionally large statue
** List of tallest statues
** :Colossal statues
* ''Colossus of Barletta'', a bronze statue of an unidentified Roman emperor
* ''Col ...
). The latter two of these machines were based on the theoretical foundation laid by Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical co ...
and developed by John von Neumann
John von Neumann (; hu, Neumann János Lajos, ; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. He was regarded as having perhaps the widest cove ...
.
The birth of artificial intelligence 1952–1956
In the 1940s and 50s, a handful of scientists from a variety of fields (mathematics, psychology, engineering, economics and political science) began to discuss the possibility of creating an artificial brain. The field of artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...
research was founded as an academic discipline in 1956.
Cybernetics and early neural networks
The earliest research into thinking machines was inspired by a confluence of ideas that became prevalent in the late 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s. Recent research inneurology
Neurology (from el, νεῦρον (neûron), "string, nerve" and the suffix -logia, "study of") is the branch of medicine dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of all categories of conditions and disease involving the brain, the spinal ...
had shown that the brain was an electrical network of neuron
A neuron, neurone, or nerve cell is an electrically excitable cell that communicates with other cells via specialized connections called synapses. The neuron is the main component of nervous tissue in all animals except sponges and placozoa. ...
s that fired in all-or-nothing pulses. Norbert Wiener's cybernetic
Cybernetics is a wide-ranging field concerned with circular causality, such as feedback, in regulatory and purposive systems. Cybernetics is named after an example of circular causal feedback, that of steering a ship, where the helmsperson ma ...
s described control and stability in electrical networks. Claude Shannon
Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer known as a "father of information theory".
As a 21-year-old master's degree student at the Massachusetts Inst ...
's information theory described digital signals (i.e., all-or-nothing signals). Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical co ...
's theory of computation
In theoretical computer science and mathematics, the theory of computation is the branch that deals with what problems can be solved on a model of computation, using an algorithm, how algorithmic efficiency, efficiently they can be solved or t ...
showed that any form of computation could be described digitally. The close relationship between these ideas suggested that it might be possible to construct an electronic brain.
Examples of work in this vein includes robots such as W. Grey Walter
William Grey Walter (February 19, 1910 – May 6, 1977) was an American-born British neurophysiologist, cybernetician and robotician.
Early life and education
Walter was born in Kansas City, Missouri, United States, on 19 February 1910, the on ...
's turtles
Turtles are an order of reptiles known as Testudines, characterized by a special shell developed mainly from their ribs. Modern turtles are divided into two major groups, the Pleurodira (side necked turtles) and Cryptodira (hidden necked tur ...
and the Johns Hopkins Beast The Johns Hopkins Beast was a mobile automaton, an early pre-robot, built in the 1960s at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. The machine had a rudimentary intelligence and the ability to survive on its own. As it wandered throu ...
. These machines did not use computers, digital electronics or symbolic reasoning; they were controlled entirely by analog circuitry.
Walter Pitts
Walter Harry Pitts, Jr. (23 April 1923 – 14 May 1969) was a logician who worked in the field of computational neuroscience.Smalheiser, Neil R"Walter Pitts", ''Perspectives in Biology and Medicine'', Volume 43, Number 2, Winter 2000, pp. 21 ...
and Warren McCulloch
Warren Sturgis McCulloch (November 16, 1898 – September 24, 1969) was an American neurophysiologist and cybernetician, known for his work on the foundation for certain brain theories and his contribution to the cybernetics movement.Ken Aizawa ( ...
analyzed networks of idealized artificial neurons and showed how they might perform simple logical functions in 1943. They were the first to describe what later researchers would call a neural network. One of the students inspired by Pitts and McCulloch
McCulloch is a Scottish surname. It's a variation of the Northern Irish surname McCullough. It's commonly found in Galloway.
Notable people with the surname include:
*Alan McCulloch (politician), New Zealand politician
*Alan McLeod McCulloch ( ...
was a young Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, ...
, then a 24-year-old graduate student. In 1951 (with Dean Edmonds) he built the first neural net machine, the SNARC.
Minsky was to become one of the most important leaders and innovators in AI for the next 50 years.
Turing's test
In 1950Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical co ...
published a landmark paper in which he speculated about the possibility of creating machines that think.
He noted that "thinking" is difficult to define and devised his famous Turing Test
The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluato ...
. If a machine could carry on a conversation (over a teleprinter
A teleprinter (teletypewriter, teletype or TTY) is an electromechanical device that can be used to send and receive typed messages through various communications channels, in both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations. Init ...
) that was indistinguishable from a conversation with a human being, then it was reasonable to say that the machine was "thinking". This simplified version of the problem allowed Turing to argue convincingly that a "thinking machine" was at least ''plausible'' and the paper answered all the most common objections to the proposition. The Turing Test
The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluato ...
was the first serious proposal in the philosophy of artificial intelligence
The philosophy of artificial intelligence is a branch of the philosophy of technology that explores artificial intelligence and its implications for knowledge and understanding of intelligence, ethics, consciousness, epistemology, and free will. ...
.
Game AI
In 1951, using theFerranti Mark 1
The Ferranti Mark 1, also known as the Manchester Electronic Computer in its sales literature, and thus sometimes called the Manchester Ferranti, was produced by British electrical engineering firm Ferranti Ltd. It was the world's first commer ...
machine of the University of Manchester
, mottoeng = Knowledge, Wisdom, Humanity
, established = 2004 – University of Manchester Predecessor institutions: 1956 – UMIST (as university college; university 1994) 1904 – Victoria University of Manchester 1880 – Victoria Univ ...
, Christopher Strachey
Christopher S. Strachey (; 16 November 1916 – 18 May 1975) was a British computer scientist. He was one of the founders of denotational semantics, and a pioneer in programming language design and computer time-sharing.F. J. Corbató, et al. ...
wrote a checkers program and Dietrich Prinz
Dietrich Gunther Prinz (March 29, 1903 – December 1989) was a computer science pioneer, notable for his work on early British computers at Ferranti, and in particular for developing the first limited chess program in 1951.
Biography
Prinz was bo ...
wrote one for chess. Arthur Samuel
Arthur Lee Samuel (December 5, 1901 – July 29, 1990) was an American pioneer in the field of computer gaming and artificial intelligence. He popularized the term "machine learning" in 1959. The Samuel Checkers-playing Program was among the wo ...
's checkers program, developed in the middle 50s and early 60s, eventually achieved sufficient skill to challenge a respectable amateur. Game AI
In video games, artificial intelligence (AI) is used to generate responsive, adaptive or intelligent behaviors primarily in non-player characters (NPCs) similar to human-like intelligence. Artificial intelligence has been an integral part of vid ...
would continue to be used as a measure of progress in AI throughout its history.
Symbolic reasoning and the Logic Theorist
When access todigital computer
A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These program ...
s became possible in the middle fifties, a few scientists instinctively recognized that a machine that could manipulate numbers could also manipulate symbols and that the manipulation of symbols could well be the essence of human thought. This was a new approach to creating thinking machines.
In 1955, Allen Newell and (future Nobel Laureate) Herbert A. Simon
Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American political scientist, with a Ph.D. in political science, whose work also influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. His primary ...
created the "Logic Theorist
Logic Theorist is a computer program written in 1956 by Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon, and Cliff Shaw.
, and It was the first program deliberately engineered to perform automated reasoning and is called "the first artificial intelligence prog ...
" (with help from J. C. Shaw). The program would eventually prove 38 of the first 52 theorems in Russell and Whitehead's ''Principia Mathematica
The ''Principia Mathematica'' (often abbreviated ''PM'') is a three-volume work on the foundations of mathematics written by mathematician–philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell and published in 1910, 1912, and 1913. ...
'', and find new and more elegant proofs for some.
Simon said that they had "solved the venerable mind/body problem, explaining how a system composed of matter can have the properties of mind."
(This was an early statement of the philosophical position John Searle would later call " Strong AI": that machines can contain minds just as human bodies do.)
Dartmouth Workshop 1956: the birth of AI
TheDartmouth Workshop
The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was a 1956 summer workshop widely consideredKline, Ronald R., Cybernetics, Automata Studies and the Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IEEE Annals of the History of ...
of 1956
was organized by Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, ...
, John McCarthy and two senior scientists: Claude Shannon
Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer known as a "father of information theory".
As a 21-year-old master's degree student at the Massachusetts Inst ...
and Nathan Rochester of IBM. The proposal for the conference included this assertion: "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it".
The participants included Ray Solomonoff
Ray Solomonoff (July 25, 1926 – December 7, 2009) was the inventor of algorithmic probability, his General Theory of Inductive Inference (also known as Universal Inductive Inference),Samuel Rathmanner and Marcus Hutter. A philosophical treatise ...
, Oliver Selfridge
Oliver Gordon Selfridge (10 May 1926 – 3 December 2008) was a pioneer of artificial intelligence. He has been called the "Father of Machine Perception." Biography
Selfridge, born in England, was a grandson of Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founde ...
, Trenchard More Trenchard More (1930 – 2019) was a mathematician and computer scientist who worked at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center and Cambridge Scientific Center after teaching at MIT and Yale.
He was also a full professor for two years at the T ...
, Arthur Samuel
Arthur Lee Samuel (December 5, 1901 – July 29, 1990) was an American pioneer in the field of computer gaming and artificial intelligence. He popularized the term "machine learning" in 1959. The Samuel Checkers-playing Program was among the wo ...
, Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon
Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American political scientist, with a Ph.D. in political science, whose work also influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. His primary ...
, all of whom would create important programs during the first decades of AI research.
At the conference Newell and Simon debuted the "Logic Theorist
Logic Theorist is a computer program written in 1956 by Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon, and Cliff Shaw.
, and It was the first program deliberately engineered to perform automated reasoning and is called "the first artificial intelligence prog ...
" and McCarthy persuaded the attendees to accept "Artificial Intelligence" as the name of the field.
The 1956 Dartmouth conference was the moment that AI gained its name, its mission, its first success and its major players, and is widely considered the birth of AI. The term "Artificial Intelligence" was chosen by McCarthy to avoid associations with cybernetics and connections with the influential cyberneticist Norbert Wiener.
Symbolic AI 1956–1974
The programs developed in the years after the Dartmouth Workshop were, to most people, simply "astonishing": computers were solving algebra word problems, proving theorems in geometry and learning to speak English. Few at the time would have believed that such "intelligent" behavior by machines was possible at all. Researchers expressed an intense optimism in private and in print, predicting that a fully intelligent machine would be built in less than 20 years. Government agencies likeDARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the Ad ...
poured money into the new field.
Approaches
There were many successful programs and new directions in the late 50s and 1960s. Among the most influential were these:Reasoning as search
Many early AI programs used the same basicalgorithm
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...
. To achieve some goal (like winning a game or proving a theorem), they proceeded step by step towards it (by making a move or a deduction) as if searching through a maze, backtracking
Backtracking is a class of algorithms for finding solutions to some computational problems, notably constraint satisfaction problems, that incrementally builds candidates to the solutions, and abandons a candidate ("backtracks") as soon as it d ...
whenever they reached a dead end. This paradigm was called " reasoning as search".
The principal difficulty was that, for many problems, the number of possible paths through the "maze" was simply astronomical (a situation known as a "combinatorial explosion
In mathematics, a combinatorial explosion is the rapid growth of the complexity of a problem due to how the combinatorics of the problem is affected by the input, constraints, and bounds of the problem. Combinatorial explosion is sometimes used to ...
"). Researchers would reduce the search space by using heuristics
A heuristic (; ), or heuristic technique, is any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, ...
or "rules of thumb
In English, the phrase ''rule of thumb'' refers to an approximate method for doing something, based on practical experience rather than theory. This usage of the phrase can be traced back to the 17th century and has been associated with various t ...
" that would eliminate those paths that were unlikely to lead to a solution.
Newell and Simon
Simon may refer to:
People
* Simon (given name), including a list of people and fictional characters with the given name Simon
* Simon (surname), including a list of people with the surname Simon
* Eugène Simon, French naturalist and the genus ...
tried to capture a general version of this algorithm in a program called the "General Problem Solver General Problem Solver (GPS) is a computer program created in 1959 by Herbert A. Simon, J. C. Shaw, and Allen Newell (RAND Corporation) intended to work as a universal problem solver machine. In contrast to the former Logic Theorist project, the ...
". Other "searching" programs were able to accomplish impressive tasks like solving problems in geometry and algebra, such as Herbert Gelernter
Herbert Leo Gelernter (December 17, 1929 – May 28, 2015)American Men and Women of Science, 21st edition, vol. 3, Thomson/ Gale, 2009, p. 76 was a professor in the Computer Science Department of Stony Brook University.
Short biography
Having ta ...
's Geometry Theorem Prover (1958) and SAINT, written by Minsky's
''Minsky's'' is a musical by Bob Martin (book), Charles Strouse (music), and Susan Birkenhead (lyrics), and is loosely based on the 1968 movie ''The Night They Raided Minsky's''.
Set during the Great Depression era in Manhattan, the story cen ...
student James Slagle (1961). Other programs searched through goals and subgoals to plan actions, like the STRIPS system developed at Stanford to control the behavior of their robot Shakey.
Natural language
An important goal of AI research is to allow computers to communicate in natural languages like English. An early success was Daniel Bobrow's program STUDENT, which could solve high school algebra word problems. Asemantic net
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and compu ...
represents concepts (e.g. "house","door") as nodes and relations among concepts (e.g. "has-a") as links between the nodes. The first AI program to use a semantic net was written by Ross Quillian and the most successful (and controversial) version was Roger Schank
Roger Carl Schank (born 1946) is an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur.
Beginning in the late 1960s, he pioneered conceptual dependency theory (within th ...
's Conceptual dependency theory Conceptual dependency theory is a model of natural language understanding used in artificial intelligence systems.
Roger Schank at Stanford University introduced the model in 1969, in the early days of artificial intelligence. This model was exten ...
.
Joseph Weizenbaum
Joseph Weizenbaum (8 January 1923 – 5 March 2008) was a German American computer scientist and a professor at MIT. The Weizenbaum Award is named after him. He is considered one of the fathers of modern artificial intelligence.
Life and caree ...
's ELIZA
ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum. Created to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between humans and machines, ...
could carry out conversations that were so realistic that users occasionally were fooled into thinking they were communicating with a human being and not a program (See ELIZA effect
The ELIZA effect, in computer science, is the tendency to unconsciously assume computer behaviors are analogous to human behaviors; that is, anthropomorphisation.
Overview
In its specific form, the ELIZA effect refers only to "the susceptibility ...
). But in fact, ELIZA had no idea what she was talking about. She simply gave a canned response Canned responses are predetermined responses to common questions.
In fields such as technical support, canned responses to frequently asked questions may be an effective solution for both the customer and the technical adviser, as they offer the p ...
or repeated back what was said to her, rephrasing her response with a few grammar rules. ELIZA was the first chatterbot
A chatbot or chatterbot is a software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text or text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live human agent. Designed to convincingly simulate the way a human would behav ...
.
Micro-worlds
In the late 60s,Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, ...
and Seymour Papert
Seymour Aubrey Papert (; 29 February 1928 – 31 July 2016) was a South African-born American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator, who spent most of his career teaching and researching at MIT. He was one of the pioneers of artificia ...
of the MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
AI Laboratory proposed that AI research should focus on artificially simple situations known as micro-worlds. They pointed out that in successful sciences like physics, basic principles were often best understood using simplified models like frictionless planes or perfectly rigid bodies. Much of the research focused on a "blocks world
The blocks world is a planning domain in artificial intelligence. The algorithm is similar to a set of wooden blocks of various shapes and colors sitting on a table. The goal is to build one or more vertical stacks of blocks. Only one block may ...
," which consists of colored blocks of various shapes and sizes arrayed on a flat surface.
This paradigm led to innovative work in machine vision
Machine vision (MV) is the technology and methods used to provide imaging-based automatic inspection and analysis for such applications as automatic inspection, process control, and robot guidance, usually in industry. Machine vision refers to ...
by Gerald Sussman
Gerald Jay Sussman (born February 8, 1947) is the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received his S.B. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from MIT in 1968 and 1973 respectively. H ...
(who led the team), Adolfo Guzman, David Waltz
David Leigh Waltz (28 May 1943 – 22 March 2012) was a computer scientist who made significant contributions in several areas of artificial intelligence, including constraint satisfaction, case-based reasoning and the application of massive ...
(who invented "constraint propagation
In constraint satisfaction, local consistency conditions are properties of constraint satisfaction problems related to the consistency of subsets of variables or constraints. They can be used to reduce the search space and make the problem easier ...
"), and especially Patrick Winston
Patrick Henry Winston (February 5, 1943 – July 19, 2019) was an American computer scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Winston was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997, succ ...
. At the same time, Minsky and Papert built a robot arm that could stack blocks, bringing the blocks world to life. The crowning achievement of the micro-world program was Terry Winograd
Terry Allen Winograd (born February 24, 1946) is an American professor of computer science at Stanford University, and co-director of the Stanford Human–Computer Interaction Group. He is known within the philosophy of mind and artificial intel ...
's SHRDLU
SHRDLU was an early natural-language understanding computer program, developed by Terry Winograd at MIT in 1968–1970. In the program, the user carries on a conversation with the computer, moving objects, naming collections and querying the ...
. It could communicate in ordinary English sentences, plan operations and execute them.
Automata
In Japan,Waseda University
, mottoeng = Independence of scholarship
, established = 21 October 1882
, type = Private
, endowment =
, president = Aiji Tanaka
, city = Shinjuku
, state = Tokyo
, country = Japan
, students = 47,959
, undergrad = 39,382
, postgrad ...
initiated the WABOT project in 1967, and in 1972 completed the WABOT-1, the world's first full-scale "intelligent" humanoid robot
A humanoid robot is a robot resembling the human body in shape. The design may be for functional purposes, such as interacting with human tools and environments, for experimental purposes, such as the study of bipedal locomotion, or for other pu ...
, or android. Its limb control system allowed it to walk with the lower limbs, and to grip and transport objects with hands, using tactile sensors. Its vision system allowed it to measure distances and directions to objects using external receptors, artificial eyes and ears. And its conversation system allowed it to communicate with a person in Japanese, with an artificial mouth.
Optimism
The first generation of AI researchers made these predictions about their work: * 1958, H. A. Simon and Allen Newell: "within ten years a digital computer will be the world's chess champion" and "within ten years a digital computer will discover and prove an important new mathematical theorem." * 1965, H. A. Simon: "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do." * 1967,Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, ...
: "Within a generation ... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved."
* 1970, Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, ...
(in ''Life'' Magazine): "In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being."
Financing
In June 1963,MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
received a $2.2 million grant from the newly created Advanced Research Projects Agency (later known as DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the Ad ...
). The money was used to fund project MAC
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Lab ...
which subsumed the "AI Group" founded by Minsky and McCarthy five years earlier. DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the Ad ...
continued to provide three million dollars a year until the 70s.
DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the Ad ...
made similar grants to Newell and Simon's program at CMU and to the Stanford AI Project (founded by John McCarthy in 1963). Another important AI laboratory was established at Edinburgh University
The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a Public university, public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted ...
by Donald Michie
Donald Michie (; 11 November 1923 – 7 July 2007) was a British researcher in artificial intelligence. During World War II, Michie worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, contributing to the effort to solve " Tunny ...
in 1965.
These four institutions would continue to be the main centers of AI research (and funding) in academia for many years.
The money was proffered with few strings attached: J. C. R. Licklider
Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (; March 11, 1915 – June 26, 1990), known simply as J. C. R. or "Lick", was an American psychologistMiller, G. A. (1991), "J. C. R. Licklider, psychologist", ''Journal of the Acoustical Society of Am ...
, then the director of ARPA, believed that his organization should "fund people, not projects!" and allowed researchers to pursue whatever directions might interest them. This created a freewheeling atmosphere at MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
that gave birth to the hacker culture
The hacker culture is a subculture of individuals who enjoy—often in collective effort—the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming the limitations of software systems or electronic hardware (mostly digital electronics), to a ...
, but this "hands off" approach would not last.
The first AI winter 1974–1980
In the 1970s, AI was subject to critiques and financial setbacks. AI researchers had failed to appreciate the difficulty of the problems they faced. Their tremendous optimism had raised expectations impossibly high, and when the promised results failed to materialize, funding for AI disappeared. At the same time, the field ofconnectionism
Connectionism refers to both an approach in the field of cognitive science that hopes to explain mental phenomena using artificial neural networks (ANN) and to a wide range of techniques and algorithms using ANNs in the context of artificial in ...
(or neural nets
Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains.
An ANN is based on a collection of connected units ...
) was shut down almost completely for 10 years by Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, ...
's devastating criticism of perceptrons
In machine learning, the perceptron (or McCulloch-Pitts neuron) is an algorithm for supervised learning of binary classifiers. A binary classifier is a function which can decide whether or not an input, represented by a vector of numbers, belon ...
.
,
,
Despite the difficulties with public perception of AI in the late 70s, new ideas were explored in logic programming
Logic programming is a programming paradigm which is largely based on formal logic. Any program written in a logic programming language is a set of sentences in logical form, expressing facts and rules about some problem domain. Major logic pro ...
, commonsense reasoning
In artificial intelligence (AI), commonsense reasoning is a human-like ability to make presumptions about the type and essence of ordinary situations humans encounter every day. These assumptions include judgments about the nature of physical objec ...
and many other areas.
The problems
In the early seventies, the capabilities of AI programs were limited. Even the most impressive could only handle trivial versions of the problems they were supposed to solve; all the programs were, in some sense, "toys". AI researchers had begun to run into several fundamental limits that could not be overcome in the 1970s. Although some of these limits would be conquered in later decades, others still stymie the field to this day. * Limited computer power: There was not enough memory or processing speed to accomplish anything truly useful. For example, Ross Quillian's successful work on natural language was demonstrated with a vocabulary of only ''twenty'' words, because that was all that would fit in memory.Hans Moravec
Hans Peter Moravec (born November 30, 1948, Kautzen, Austria) is an adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. He is known for his work on robotics, artificial intelligence, and writings ...
argued in 1976 that computers were still millions of times too weak to exhibit intelligence. He suggested an analogy: artificial intelligence requires computer power in the same way that aircraft require horsepower
Horsepower (hp) is a unit of measurement of power, or the rate at which work is done, usually in reference to the output of engines or motors. There are many different standards and types of horsepower. Two common definitions used today are t ...
. Below a certain threshold, it's impossible, but, as power increases, eventually it could become easy. With regard to computer vision, Moravec estimated that simply matching the edge and motion detection capabilities of human retina in real time would require a general-purpose computer capable of 109 operations/second (1000 MIPS). As of 2011, practical computer vision applications require 10,000 to 1,000,000 MIPS. By comparison, the fastest supercomputer in 1976, Cray-1 (retailing at $5 million to $8 million), was only capable of around 80 to 130 MIPS, and a typical desktop computer at the time achieved less than 1 MIPS.
* Intractability and the combinatorial explosion
In mathematics, a combinatorial explosion is the rapid growth of the complexity of a problem due to how the combinatorics of the problem is affected by the input, constraints, and bounds of the problem. Combinatorial explosion is sometimes used to ...
. In 1972 Richard Karp
Richard Manning Karp (born January 3, 1935) is an American computer scientist and computational theorist at the University of California, Berkeley. He is most notable for his research in the theory of algorithms, for which he received a Turing ...
(building on Stephen Cook
Stephen Arthur Cook (born December 14, 1939) is an American-Canadian computer scientist and mathematician who has made significant contributions to the fields of complexity theory and proof complexity. He is a university professor at the Unive ...
's 1971 theorem
In mathematics, a theorem is a statement that has been proved, or can be proved. The ''proof'' of a theorem is a logical argument that uses the inference rules of a deductive system to establish that the theorem is a logical consequence of t ...
) showed there are many problems that can probably only be solved in exponential time
In computer science, the time complexity is the computational complexity that describes the amount of computer time it takes to run an algorithm. Time complexity is commonly estimated by counting the number of elementary operations performed by t ...
(in the size of the inputs). Finding optimal solutions to these problems requires unimaginable amounts of computer time except when the problems are trivial. This almost certainly meant that many of the "toy" solutions used by AI would probably never scale up into useful systems.
* Commonsense knowledge and reasoning. Many important artificial intelligence applications like vision
Vision, Visions, or The Vision may refer to:
Perception Optical perception
* Visual perception, the sense of sight
* Visual system, the physical mechanism of eyesight
* Computer vision, a field dealing with how computers can be made to gain und ...
or natural language require simply enormous amounts of information about the world: the program needs to have some idea of what it might be looking at or what it is talking about. This requires that the program know most of the same things about the world that a child does. Researchers soon discovered that this was a truly ''vast'' amount of information. No one in 1970 could build a database so large and no one knew how a program might learn so much information.
* Moravec's paradox: Proving theorems and solving geometry problems is comparatively easy for computers, but a supposedly simple task like recognizing a face or crossing a room without bumping into anything is extremely difficult. This helps explain why research into vision
Vision, Visions, or The Vision may refer to:
Perception Optical perception
* Visual perception, the sense of sight
* Visual system, the physical mechanism of eyesight
* Computer vision, a field dealing with how computers can be made to gain und ...
and robotics
Robotics is an interdisciplinary branch of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist humans. Robotics integrate ...
had made so little progress by the middle 1970s.
* The frame
A frame is often a structural system that supports other components of a physical construction and/or steel frame that limits the construction's extent.
Frame and FRAME may also refer to:
Physical objects
In building construction
*Framing (con ...
and qualification problem
In philosophy and AI (especially, knowledge-based systems), the qualification problem is concerned with the impossibility of listing ''all'' the preconditions required for a real-world action to have its intended effect. It might be posed as ''ho ...
s. AI researchers (like John McCarthy) who used logic
Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premise ...
discovered that they could not represent ordinary deductions that involved planning or default reasoning without making changes to the structure of logic itself. They developed new logics (like non-monotonic logic
A non-monotonic logic is a formal logic whose conclusion relation is not monotonic. In other words, non-monotonic logics are devised to capture and represent defeasible inferences (cf. defeasible reasoning), i.e., a kind of inference in which re ...
s and modal logics) to try to solve the problems.
The end of funding
The agencies which funded AI research (such as the British government,DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the Ad ...
and NRC) became frustrated with the lack of progress and eventually cut off almost all funding for undirected research into AI. The pattern began as early as 1966 when the ALPAC report appeared criticizing machine translation efforts. After spending 20 million dollars, the NRC ended all support.
In 1973, the Lighthill report
__NOTOC__
''Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey'', commonly known as the Lighthill report, is a scholarly article by James Lighthill, published in ''Artificial Intelligence: a paper symposium'' in 1973.
Published in 1973, it was compiled by ...
on the state of AI research in England criticized the utter failure of AI to achieve its "grandiose objectives" and led to the dismantling of AI research in that country.
(The report specifically mentioned the combinatorial explosion
In mathematics, a combinatorial explosion is the rapid growth of the complexity of a problem due to how the combinatorics of the problem is affected by the input, constraints, and bounds of the problem. Combinatorial explosion is sometimes used to ...
problem as a reason for AI's failings.)
DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the Ad ...
was deeply disappointed with researchers working on the Speech Understanding Research program at CMU and canceled an annual grant of three million dollars.
By 1974, funding for AI projects was hard to find.
Hans Moravec
Hans Peter Moravec (born November 30, 1948, Kautzen, Austria) is an adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. He is known for his work on robotics, artificial intelligence, and writings ...
blamed the crisis on the unrealistic predictions of his colleagues. "Many researchers were caught up in a web of increasing exaggeration."
However, there was another issue: since the passage of the Mansfield Amendment
Michael Joseph Mansfield (March 16, 1903 – October 5, 2001) was an American politician and diplomat. A Democrat, he served as a U.S. representative (1943–1953) and a U.S. senator (1953–1977) from Montana. He was the longest-serving Sena ...
in 1969, DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the Ad ...
had been under increasing pressure to fund "mission-oriented direct research, rather than basic undirected research". Funding for the creative, freewheeling exploration that had gone on in the 60s would not come from DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the Ad ...
. Instead, the money was directed at specific projects with clear objectives, such as autonomous tanks and battle management systems.
Critiques from across campus
Several philosophers had strong objections to the claims being made by AI researchers. One of the earliest was John Lucas, who argued that Gödel's incompleteness theorem showed that aformal system
A formal system is an abstract structure used for inferring theorems from axioms according to a set of rules. These rules, which are used for carrying out the inference of theorems from axioms, are the logical calculus of the formal system.
A form ...
(such as a computer program) could never see the truth of certain statements, while a human being could. Hubert Dreyfus
Hubert Lederer Dreyfus (; October 15, 1929 – April 22, 2017) was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main interests included phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of bo ...
ridiculed the broken promises of the 1960s and critiqued the assumptions of AI, arguing that human reasoning actually involved very little "symbol processing" and a great deal of embodied, instinctive, unconscious " know how". John Searle's Chinese Room argument, presented in 1980, attempted to show that a program could not be said to "understand" the symbols that it uses (a quality called " intentionality"). If the symbols have no meaning for the machine, Searle argued, then the machine can not be described as "thinking".
These critiques were not taken seriously by AI researchers, often because they seemed so far off the point. Problems like intractability and commonsense knowledge seemed much more immediate and serious. It was unclear what difference " know how" or " intentionality" made to an actual computer program. Minsky said of Dreyfus and Searle "they misunderstand, and should be ignored." Dreyfus, who taught at MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
, was given a cold shoulder: he later said that AI researchers "dared not be seen having lunch with me." Joseph Weizenbaum
Joseph Weizenbaum (8 January 1923 – 5 March 2008) was a German American computer scientist and a professor at MIT. The Weizenbaum Award is named after him. He is considered one of the fathers of modern artificial intelligence.
Life and caree ...
, the author of ELIZA
ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum. Created to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between humans and machines, ...
, felt his colleagues' treatment of Dreyfus was unprofessional and childish. Although he was an outspoken critic of Dreyfus' positions, he "deliberately made it plain that theirs was not the way to treat a human being."
Weizenbaum began to have serious ethical doubts about AI when Kenneth Colby
Kenneth Mark Colby (1920 – April 20, 2001) was an American psychiatrist dedicated to the theory and application of computer science and artificial intelligence to psychiatry. Colby was a pioneer in the development of computer technology as ...
wrote a "computer program which can conduct psychotherapeutic dialogue" based on ELIZA. Weizenbaum was disturbed that Colby saw a mindless program as a serious therapeutic tool. A feud began, and the situation was not helped when Colby did not credit Weizenbaum for his contribution to the program. In 1976, Weizenbaum published ''Computer Power and Human Reason
''Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation'' (1976) by Joseph Weizenbaum displays the author's ambivalence towards computer technology and lays out the case that while artificial intelligence may be possible, we should never ...
'' which argued that the misuse of artificial intelligence has the potential to devalue human life.
Perceptrons and the attack on connectionism
Aperceptron
In machine learning, the perceptron (or McCulloch-Pitts neuron) is an algorithm for supervised learning of binary classifiers. A binary classifier is a function which can decide whether or not an input, represented by a vector of numbers, belon ...
was a form of neural network introduced in 1958 by Frank Rosenblatt
Frank Rosenblatt (July 11, 1928July 11, 1971) was an American psychologist notable in the field of artificial intelligence. He is sometimes called the father of deep learning.
Life and career
Rosenblatt was born in New Rochelle, New York as son o ...
, who had been a schoolmate of Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, ...
at the Bronx High School of Science
The Bronx High School of Science, commonly called Bronx Science, is a public specialized high school in The Bronx in New York City. It is operated by the New York City Department of Education. Admission to Bronx Science involves passing the Sp ...
. Like most AI researchers, he was optimistic about their power, predicting that "perceptron may eventually be able to learn, make decisions, and translate languages." An active research program into the paradigm was carried out throughout the 1960s but came to a sudden halt with the publication of Minsky and Papert's 1969 book ''Perceptrons
In machine learning, the perceptron (or McCulloch-Pitts neuron) is an algorithm for supervised learning of binary classifiers. A binary classifier is a function which can decide whether or not an input, represented by a vector of numbers, belon ...
''. It suggested that there were severe limitations to what perceptrons could do and that Frank Rosenblatt
Frank Rosenblatt (July 11, 1928July 11, 1971) was an American psychologist notable in the field of artificial intelligence. He is sometimes called the father of deep learning.
Life and career
Rosenblatt was born in New Rochelle, New York as son o ...
's predictions had been grossly exaggerated. The effect of the book was devastating: virtually no research at all was done in connectionism
Connectionism refers to both an approach in the field of cognitive science that hopes to explain mental phenomena using artificial neural networks (ANN) and to a wide range of techniques and algorithms using ANNs in the context of artificial in ...
for 10 years. Eventually, a new generation of researchers would revive the field and thereafter it would become a vital and useful part of artificial intelligence. Rosenblatt Rosenblatt is a surname of German and Jewish origin, meaning "rose leaf". People with this surname include:
* Albert Rosenblatt (born 1936), New York Court of Appeals judge
* Dana Rosenblatt, known as "Dangerous" (born 1972), American boxer
* Elie ...
would not live to see this, as he died in a boating accident shortly after the book was published.
Logic and symbolic reasoning: the "neats"
Logic was introduced into AI research as early as 1959, by John McCarthy in his Advice Taker proposal. In 1963, J. Alan Robinson had discovered a simple method to implement deduction on computers, theresolution
Resolution(s) may refer to:
Common meanings
* Resolution (debate), the statement which is debated in policy debate
* Resolution (law), a written motion adopted by a deliberative body
* New Year's resolution, a commitment that an individual mak ...
and unification algorithm. However, straightforward implementations, like those attempted by McCarthy and his students in the late 1960s, were especially intractable: the programs required astronomical numbers of steps to prove simple theorems. A more fruitful approach to logic was developed in the 1970s by Robert Kowalski
Robert Anthony Kowalski (born 15 May 1941) is an American-British logician and computer scientist, whose research is concerned with developing both human-oriented models of computing and computational models of human thinking. He has spent mo ...
at the University of Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...
, and soon this led to the collaboration with French researchers Alain Colmerauer
Alain Colmerauer (24 January 1941 – 12 May 2017) was a French computer scientist. He was a professor at Aix-Marseille University, and the creator of the logic programming language Prolog.
Early life
Alain Colmerauer was born on 24 January 194 ...
and Philippe Roussel who created the successful logic programming language Prolog
Prolog is a logic programming language associated with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics.
Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is intended primarily ...
.
Prolog uses a subset of logic (Horn clause In mathematical logic and logic programming, a Horn clause is a logical formula of a particular rule-like form which gives it useful properties for use in logic programming, formal specification, and model theory. Horn clauses are named for the log ...
s, closely related to "rules" and " production rules") that permit tractable computation. Rules would continue to be influential, providing a foundation for Edward Feigenbaum
Edward Albert Feigenbaum (born January 20, 1936) is a computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence, and joint winner of the 1994 ACM Turing Award. He is often called the "father of expert systems."
Education and early life ...
's expert systems
In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system emulating the decision-making ability of a human expert.
Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge, represented mainly as if ...
and the continuing work by Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon
Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American political scientist, with a Ph.D. in political science, whose work also influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. His primary ...
that would lead to Soar and their unified theories of cognition
''Unified Theories of Cognition'' is a 1990 book by Allen Newell. Newell argues for the need of a set of general assumptions for cognitive models that account for all of cognition: a unified theory of cognition, or cognitive architecture. The re ...
.
Critics of the logical approach noted, as Dreyfus had, that human beings rarely used logic when they solved problems. Experiments by psychologists like Peter Wason
Peter Cathcart Wason (22 April 1924 – 17 April 2003) was a cognitive psychologist at University College, London who pioneered the Psychology of Reasoning. He progressed explanations as to why people make certain consistent mistakes in logical r ...
, Eleanor Rosch
Eleanor Rosch (once known as Eleanor Rosch Heider;"Natural Categories", Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 4, No. 3, (May 1973), p. 328. born 1938) is an American psychologist. She is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, s ...
, Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman and others provided proof.
McCarthy responded that what people do is irrelevant. He argued that what is really needed are machines that can solve problems—not machines that think as people do.
Frames and scripts: the "scuffles"
Among the critics of McCarthy's approach were his colleagues across the country atMIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
. Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, ...
, Seymour Papert
Seymour Aubrey Papert (; 29 February 1928 – 31 July 2016) was a South African-born American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator, who spent most of his career teaching and researching at MIT. He was one of the pioneers of artificia ...
and Roger Schank
Roger Carl Schank (born 1946) is an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur.
Beginning in the late 1960s, he pioneered conceptual dependency theory (within th ...
were trying to solve problems like "story understanding" and "object recognition" that ''required'' a machine to think like a person. In order to use ordinary concepts like "chair" or "restaurant" they had to make all the same illogical assumptions that people normally made. Unfortunately, imprecise concepts like these are hard to represent in logic. Gerald Sussman
Gerald Jay Sussman (born February 8, 1947) is the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received his S.B. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from MIT in 1968 and 1973 respectively. H ...
observed that "using precise language to describe essentially imprecise concepts doesn't make them any more precise." Schank described their "anti-logic" approaches as " scruffy", as opposed to the "neat
Neat may refer to:
* Neat (bartending), a single, unmixed liquor served in a rocks glass
* Neat, an old term for horned oxen
* Neat Records, a British record label
* Neuroevolution of augmenting topologies (NEAT), a genetic algorithm (GA) for t ...
" paradigms used by McCarthy, Kowalski
Kowalski (; feminine: Kowalska, plural: Kowalscy) is the second most common surname in Poland (140,471 people in 2009). ''Kowalski'' surname is derived from the word ''kowal'', meaning " lackmith".
" Jan Kowalski" is a name that is used as a p ...
, Feigenbaum
Feigenbaum is a German surname meaning " fig tree". Notable people with the surname include:
* Armand V. Feigenbaum (1922-2014), American quality control expert
* B. J. Feigenbaum (1900-1984), American legislator and lawyer
* Clive Feigenbaum, ...
, Newell and Simon
Simon may refer to:
People
* Simon (given name), including a list of people and fictional characters with the given name Simon
* Simon (surname), including a list of people with the surname Simon
* Eugène Simon, French naturalist and the genus ...
.
In 1975, in a seminal paper, Minsky noted that many of his fellow "scruffy" researchers were using the same kind of tool: a framework that captures all our common sense assumptions about something. For example, if we use the concept of a bird, there is a constellation of facts that immediately come to mind: we might assume that it flies, eats worms and so on. We know these facts are not always true and that deductions using these facts will not be "logical", but these structured sets of assumptions are part of the ''context'' of everything we say and think. He called these structures " frames". Schank used a version of frames he called "scripts
Script may refer to:
Writing systems
* Script, a distinctive writing system, based on a repertoire of specific elements or symbols, or that repertoire
* Script (styles of handwriting)
** Script typeface, a typeface with characteristics of handw ...
" to successfully answer questions about short stories in English.
Boom 1980–1987
In the 1980s a form of AI program called " expert systems" was adopted by corporations around the world andknowledge
Knowledge can be defined as Descriptive knowledge, awareness of facts or as Procedural knowledge, practical skills, and may also refer to Knowledge by acquaintance, familiarity with objects or situations. Knowledge of facts, also called pro ...
became the focus of mainstream AI research. In those same years, the Japanese government aggressively funded AI with its fifth generation computer
The Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) was a 10-year initiative begun in 1982 by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) to create computers using massively parallel computing and logic programming. It aimed to create ...
project. Another encouraging event in the early 1980s was the revival of connectionism
Connectionism refers to both an approach in the field of cognitive science that hopes to explain mental phenomena using artificial neural networks (ANN) and to a wide range of techniques and algorithms using ANNs in the context of artificial in ...
in the work of John Hopfield
John Joseph Hopfield (born July 15, 1933) is an American scientist most widely known for his invention of an associative neural network in 1982. It is now more commonly known as the Hopfield network.
Biography
Hopfield was born in 1933 to Po ...
and David Rumelhart
David Everett Rumelhart (June 12, 1942 – March 13, 2011) was an American psychologist who made many contributions to the formal analysis of human cognition, working primarily within the frameworks of mathematical psychology, symbolic artif ...
. Once again, AI had achieved success.
The rise of expert systems
An expert system is a program that answers questions or solves problems about a specific domain of knowledge, using logicalrules
Rule or ruling may refer to:
Education
* Royal University of Law and Economics (RULE), a university in Cambodia
Human activity
* The exercise of political or personal control by someone with authority or power
* Business rule, a rule pert ...
that are derived from the knowledge of experts. The earliest examples were developed by Edward Feigenbaum
Edward Albert Feigenbaum (born January 20, 1936) is a computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence, and joint winner of the 1994 ACM Turing Award. He is often called the "father of expert systems."
Education and early life ...
and his students. Dendral Dendral was a project in artificial intelligence (AI) of the 1960s, and the computer software expert system that it produced. Its primary aim was to study hypothesis formation and discovery in science. For that, a specific task in science was chose ...
, begun in 1965, identified compounds from spectrometer readings. MYCIN, developed in 1972, diagnosed infectious blood diseases. They demonstrated the feasibility of the approach.
Expert systems restricted themselves to a small domain of specific knowledge (thus avoiding the commonsense knowledge problem) and their simple design made it relatively easy for programs to be built and then modified once they were in place. All in all, the programs proved to be ''useful'': something that AI had not been able to achieve up to this point.
In 1980, an expert system called XCON was completed at CMU for the Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president un ...
. It was an enormous success: it was saving the company 40 million dollars annually by 1986. Corporations around the world began to develop and deploy expert systems and by 1985 they were spending over a billion dollars on AI, most of it to in-house AI departments. An industry grew up to support them, including hardware companies like Symbolics and Lisp Machines and software companies such as IntelliCorp (Software), IntelliCorp and Cleverpath AION Business Rules Expert, Aion.
The knowledge revolution
The power of expert systems came from the expert knowledge they contained. They were part of a new direction in AI research that had been gaining ground throughout the 70s. "AI researchers were beginning to suspect—reluctantly, for it violated the scientific canon of parsimony—that intelligence might very well be based on the ability to use large amounts of diverse knowledge in different ways," writes Pamela McCorduck. "[T]he great lesson from the 1970s was that intelligent behavior depended very much on dealing with knowledge, sometimes quite detailed knowledge, of a domain where a given task lay". Knowledge based systems and knowledge engineering became a major focus of AI research in the 1980s. The 1980s also saw the birth of Cyc, the first attempt to attack the commonsense reasoning, commonsense knowledge problem directly, by creating a massive database that would contain all the mundane facts that the average person knows. Douglas Lenat, who started and led the project, argued that there is no shortcut ― the only way for machines to know the meaning of human concepts is to teach them, one concept at a time, by hand. The project was not expected to be completed for many decades. Chess playing programs HiTech and Deep Thought (chess computer), Deep Thought defeated chess masters in 1989. Both were developed by Carnegie Mellon University; Deep Thought development paved the way for Deep Blue (chess computer), Deep Blue.The money returns: the Fifth Generation project
In 1981, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry set aside $850 million for the Fifth generation computer project. Their objectives were to write programs and build machines that could carry on conversations, translate languages, interpret pictures, and reason like human beings. Much to the chagrin of neats vs. scruffies, scruffies, they choseProlog
Prolog is a logic programming language associated with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics.
Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is intended primarily ...
as the primary computer language for the project.
Other countries responded with new programs of their own. The UK began the £350 million Alvey project. A consortium of American companies formed the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (or "MCC") to fund large scale projects in AI and information technology. DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the Ad ...
responded as well, founding the Strategic Computing Initiative and tripling its investment in AI between 1984 and 1988.
The revival of connectionism
In 1982, physicistJohn Hopfield
John Joseph Hopfield (born July 15, 1933) is an American scientist most widely known for his invention of an associative neural network in 1982. It is now more commonly known as the Hopfield network.
Biography
Hopfield was born in 1933 to Po ...
was able to prove that a form of neural network (now called a "Hopfield net") could learn and process information in a completely new way. Around the same time, Geoffrey Hinton and David Rumelhart
David Everett Rumelhart (June 12, 1942 – March 13, 2011) was an American psychologist who made many contributions to the formal analysis of human cognition, working primarily within the frameworks of mathematical psychology, symbolic artif ...
popularized a method for training neural networks called "backpropagation", also known as the reverse mode of automatic differentiation published by Seppo Linnainmaa (1970) and applied to neural networks by Paul Werbos. These two discoveries helped to revive the field of connectionism
Connectionism refers to both an approach in the field of cognitive science that hopes to explain mental phenomena using artificial neural networks (ANN) and to a wide range of techniques and algorithms using ANNs in the context of artificial in ...
.
The new field was unified and inspired by the appearance of ''Parallel Distributed Processing'' in 1986—a two volume collection of papers edited by David Rumelhart, Rumelhart and psychologist James McClelland (psychologist), James McClelland. Neural networks would become commercially successful in the 1990s, when they began to be used as the engines driving programs like optical character recognition and speech recognition.
The development of metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) very-large-scale integration (VLSI), in the form of complementary MOS (CMOS) technology, enabled the development of practical artificial neural network (ANN) technology in the 1980s. A landmark publication in the field was the 1989 book ''Analog VLSI Implementation of Neural Systems'' by Carver A. Mead and Mohammed Ismail.
Bust: the second AI winter 1987–1993
The business community's fascination with AI rose and fell in the 1980s in the classic pattern of an economic bubble. The collapse was due to the failure of commercial vendors to develop a wide variety of workable solutions. As dozens of companies failed, the perception was that the technology was not viable. However, the field continued to make advances despite the criticism. Numerous researchers, includingrobotics
Robotics is an interdisciplinary branch of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist humans. Robotics integrate ...
developers Rodney Brooks and Hans Moravec
Hans Peter Moravec (born November 30, 1948, Kautzen, Austria) is an adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. He is known for his work on robotics, artificial intelligence, and writings ...
, argued for an entirely new approach to artificial intelligence.
AI winter
The term "AI winter
In the history of artificial intelligence, an AI winter is a period of reduced funding and interest in artificial intelligence research.IBM had been steadily gaining speed and power and in 1987 they became more powerful than the more expensive Lisp machines made by Symbolics and others. There was no longer a good reason to buy them. An entire industry worth half a billion dollars was demolished overnight.
Eventually the earliest successful expert systems, such as XCON, proved too expensive to maintain. They were difficult to update, they could not learn, they were "brittle (software), brittle" (i.e., they could make grotesque mistakes when given unusual inputs), and they fell prey to problems (such as the
Advanced Human Intelligence
where he defines strong AI as "machine intelligence with the full range of human intelligence." "full AI", or synthetic intelligence as opposed to "weak AI" or "narrow AI". (Academic sources reserve "strong AI" to refer to machines capable of experiencing consciousness.) Foundation models, which are large artificial intelligence models trained on vast quantities of unlabeled data that can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks, began to be developed in 2018. Models such as GPT-3 released by OpenAI in 2020, and Gato (DeepMind), Gato released by DeepMind in 2022, have been described as important milestones on the path to artificial general intelligence.
qualification problem
In philosophy and AI (especially, knowledge-based systems), the qualification problem is concerned with the impossibility of listing ''all'' the preconditions required for a real-world action to have its intended effect. It might be posed as ''ho ...
) that had been identified years earlier. Expert systems proved useful, but only in a few special contexts.
In the late 1980s, the Strategic Computing Initiative cut funding to AI "deeply and brutally". New leadership at DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the Ad ...
had decided that AI was not "the next wave" and directed funds towards projects that seemed more likely to produce immediate results.
By 1991, the impressive list of goals penned in 1981 for Japan's fifth generation computer, Fifth Generation Project had not been met. Indeed, some of them, like "carry on a casual conversation" had not been met by 2010., . McCorduck writes "Two and a half decades later, we can see that the Japanese didn't quite meet all of those ambitious goals." As with other AI projects, expectations had run much higher than what was actually possible.
Over 300 AI companies had shut down, gone bankrupt, or been acquired by the end of 1993, effectively ending the first commercial wave of AI. In 1994, HP Newquist stated in ''The Brain Makers'' that "The immediate future of artificial intelligence—in its commercial form—seems to rest in part on the continued success of neural networks."
Nouvelle AI and embodied reason
In the late 1980s, several researchers advocated a completely new approach to artificial intelligence, based on robotics. They believed that, to show real intelligence, a machine needs to have a ''body'' — it needs to perceive, move, survive and deal with the world. They argued that these sensorimotor skills are essential to higher level skills likecommonsense reasoning
In artificial intelligence (AI), commonsense reasoning is a human-like ability to make presumptions about the type and essence of ordinary situations humans encounter every day. These assumptions include judgments about the nature of physical objec ...
and that abstract reasoning was actually the ''least'' interesting or important human skill (see Moravec's paradox). They advocated building intelligence "from the bottom up."
The approach revived ideas from cybernetic
Cybernetics is a wide-ranging field concerned with circular causality, such as feedback, in regulatory and purposive systems. Cybernetics is named after an example of circular causal feedback, that of steering a ship, where the helmsperson ma ...
s and control theory that had been unpopular since the sixties. Another precursor was David Marr (neuroscientist), David Marr, who had come to MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
in the late 1970s from a successful background in theoretical neuroscience to lead the group studying vision
Vision, Visions, or The Vision may refer to:
Perception Optical perception
* Visual perception, the sense of sight
* Visual system, the physical mechanism of eyesight
* Computer vision, a field dealing with how computers can be made to gain und ...
. He rejected all symbolic approaches (''both'' McCarthy's logic and Minsky's frames), arguing that AI needed to understand the physical machinery of vision from the bottom up before any symbolic processing took place. (Marr's work would be cut short by leukemia in 1980.)
In his 1990 paper "Elephants Don't Play Chess," robotics researcher Rodney Brooks took direct aim at the physical symbol system, physical symbol system hypothesis, arguing that symbols are not always necessary since "the world is its own best model. It is always exactly up to date. It always has every detail there is to be known. The trick is to sense it appropriately and often enough." In the 1980s and 1990s, many cognitive science, cognitive scientists also rejected the symbol processing model of the mind and argued that the body was essential for reasoning, a theory called the embodied mind thesis.
AI 1993–2011
The field of AI, now more than a half a century old, finally achieved some of its oldest goals. It began to be used successfully throughout the technology industry, although somewhat behind the scenes. Some of the success was due to increasing computer power and some was achieved by focusing on specific isolated problems and pursuing them with the highest standards of scientific accountability. Still, the reputation of AI, in the business world at least, was less than pristine. Inside the field there was little agreement on the reasons for AI's failure to fulfill the dream of human level intelligence that had captured the imagination of the world in the 1960s. Together, all these factors helped to fragment AI into competing subfields focused on particular problems or approaches, sometimes even under new names that disguised the tarnished pedigree of "artificial intelligence". AI was both more cautious and more successful than it had ever been.Milestones and Moore's law
On 11 May 1997, IBM Deep Blue, Deep Blue became the first computer chess-playing system to beat a reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov. The super computer was a specialized version of a framework produced by IBM, and was capable of processing twice as many moves per second as it had during the first match (which Deep Blue had lost), reportedly 200,000,000 moves per second. The event was broadcast live over the internet and received over 74 million hits. In 2005, a Stanford robot won the DARPA Grand Challenge by driving autonomously for 131 miles along an unrehearsed desert trail. Two years later, a team from CMU won the DARPA Urban Challenge by autonomously navigating 55 miles in an Urban environment while adhering to traffic hazards and all traffic laws. In February 2011, in a Jeopardy! quiz show exhibition match, IBM's question answering system, Watson (artificial intelligence software), Watson, defeated the two greatest Jeopardy! champions, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, by a significant margin. These successes were not due to some revolutionary new paradigm, but mostly on the tedious application of engineering skill and on the tremendous increase in the speed and capacity of computer by the 90s. In fact, IBM Deep Blue, Deep Blue's computer was 10 million times faster than theFerranti Mark 1
The Ferranti Mark 1, also known as the Manchester Electronic Computer in its sales literature, and thus sometimes called the Manchester Ferranti, was produced by British electrical engineering firm Ferranti Ltd. It was the world's first commer ...
that Christopher Strachey
Christopher S. Strachey (; 16 November 1916 – 18 May 1975) was a British computer scientist. He was one of the founders of denotational semantics, and a pioneer in programming language design and computer time-sharing.F. J. Corbató, et al. ...
taught to play chess in 1951. This dramatic increase is measured by Moore's law, which predicts that the speed and memory capacity of computers doubles every two years, as a result of metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) transistor counts doubling every two years. The fundamental problem of "raw computer power" was slowly being overcome.
Intelligent agents
A new paradigm called "intelligent agents" became widely accepted during the 1990s. Although earlier researchers had proposed modular "divide and conquer" approaches to AI, the intelligent agent did not reach its modern form until Judea Pearl, Allen Newell, Leslie P. Kaelbling, and others brought concepts from decision theory and economics into the study of AI. When the economics, economist's definition of a rational agent was married to computer science's definition of an object-oriented programming, object or module (programming), module, the intelligent agent paradigm was complete. An intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximize its chances of success. By this definition, simple programs that solve specific problems are "intelligent agents", as are human beings and organizations of human beings, such as firms. The intelligent agent, intelligent agent paradigm defines AI research as "the study of intelligent agents". This is a generalization of some earlier definitions of AI: it goes beyond studying human intelligence; it studies all kinds of intelligence. The paradigm gave researchers license to study isolated problems and find solutions that were both verifiable and useful. It provided a common language to describe problems and share their solutions with each other, and with other fields that also used concepts of abstract agents, like economics and control theory. It was hoped that a complete agent architecture (like Allen Newell, Newell's Soar (cognitive architecture), SOAR) would one day allow researchers to build more versatile and intelligent systems out of interacting intelligent agents.Probabilistic reasoning and greater rigor
AI researchers began to develop and use sophisticated mathematical tools more than they ever had in the past. There was a widespread realization that many of the problems that AI needed to solve were already being worked on by researchers in fields like mathematics, electrical engineering, economics or operations research. The shared mathematical language allowed both a higher level of collaboration with more established and successful fields and the achievement of results which were measurable and provable; AI had become a more rigorous "scientific" discipline. describe this as nothing less than a "revolution". They had argued in their 2002 textbook that this increased rigor could be viewed plausibly as a "victory of the neats," but subsequently qualified that by saying, in their 2020 AI textbook, that "The present emphasis on deep learning may represent a resurgence of the scruffies." Judea Pearl's influential 1988 book brought probability and decision theory into AI. Among the many new tools in use were Bayesian networks, hidden Markov models, information theory, stochastic modeling and classical optimization (mathematics), optimization. Precise mathematical descriptions were also developed for "computational intelligence" paradigms like neural networks and evolutionary algorithms.AI behind the scenes
Algorithms originally developed by AI researchers began to appear as parts of larger systems. AI had solved a lot of very difficult problems and their solutions proved to be useful throughout the technology industry, such as data mining, industrial robots, industrial robotics, logistics, speech recognition, banking software,"AI-inspired systems were already integral to many everyday technologies such as internet search engines, bank software for processing transactions and in medical diagnosis." Nick Bostrom, quoted in medical diagnosis and Google's search engine. The field of AI received little or no credit for these successes in the 1990s and early 2000s. Many of AI's greatest innovations have been reduced to the status of just another item in the tool chest of computer science. Nick Bostrom explains "A lot of cutting edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough it's not labeled AI anymore." Many researchers in AI in the 1990s deliberately called their work by other names, such as Informatics (academic field), informatics, knowledge-based systems, cognitive systems or computational intelligence. In part, this may have been because they considered their field to be fundamentally different from AI, but also the new names help to procure funding. In the commercial world at least, the failed promises of the AI Winter continued to haunt AI research into the 2000s, as the ''New York Times'' reported in 2005: "Computer scientists and software engineers avoided the term artificial intelligence for fear of being viewed as wild-eyed dreamers."Predictions (or "Where is HAL 9000?")
In 1968, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick had imagined that, by the year 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2001, a machine would exist with an intelligence that matched or exceeded the capability of human beings. The character they created, HAL 9000, was based on a belief shared by many leading AI researchers that such a machine would exist by the year 2001. In 2001, AI founderMarvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, ...
asked "So the question is why didn't we get HAL in 2001?" Minsky believed that the answer is that the central problems, like commonsense reasoning
In artificial intelligence (AI), commonsense reasoning is a human-like ability to make presumptions about the type and essence of ordinary situations humans encounter every day. These assumptions include judgments about the nature of physical objec ...
, were being neglected, while most researchers pursued things like commercial applications of neural nets
Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains.
An ANN is based on a collection of connected units ...
or genetic algorithms. John McCarthy, on the other hand, still blamed the qualification problem
In philosophy and AI (especially, knowledge-based systems), the qualification problem is concerned with the impossibility of listing ''all'' the preconditions required for a real-world action to have its intended effect. It might be posed as ''ho ...
. For Ray Kurzweil, the issue is computer power and, using Moore's Law, he predicted that machines with human-level intelligence will appear by 2029. Jeff Hawkins argued that neural net research ignores the essential properties of the human cerebral cortex, cortex, preferring simple models that have been successful at solving simple problems. There were many other explanations and for each there was a corresponding research program underway.
Deep learning, big data and artificial general intelligence: 2011–present
In the first decades of the 21st century, access to large amounts of data (known as "big data"), Moore's law, cheaper and faster computers and advancedmachine learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence.
Machine ...
techniques were successfully applied to many problems throughout the economy. In fact, McKinsey Global Institute estimated in their famous paper "Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity" that "by 2009, nearly all sectors in the US economy had at least an average of 200 terabytes of stored data".
By 2016, the market for AI-related products, hardware, and software reached more than 8 billion dollars, and the New York Times reported that interest in AI had reached a "frenzy". The applications of big data began to reach into other fields as well, such as training models in ecology and for various applications in economics. Advances in deep learning (particularly deep convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks) drove progress and research in image and video processing, text analysis, and even speech recognition.
Deep learning
Deep learning is a branch of machine learning that models high level abstractions in data by using a deep graph with many processing layers. According to the Universal approximation theorem, deep-ness isn't necessary for a neural network to be able to approximate arbitrary continuous functions. Even so, there are many problems that are common to shallow networks (such as overfitting) that deep networks help avoid. As such, deep neural networks are able to realistically generate much more complex models as compared to their shallow counterparts. However, deep learning has problems of its own. A common problem for recurrent neural networks is the vanishing gradient problem, which is where gradients passed between layers gradually shrink and literally disappear as they are rounded off to zero. There have been many methods developed to approach this problem, such as Long short-term memory units. State-of-the-art deep neural network architectures can sometimes even rival human accuracy in fields like computer vision, specifically on things like the MNIST database, and traffic sign recognition. Language processing engines powered by smart search engines can easily beat humans at answering general trivia questions (such as IBM Watson), and recent developments in deep learning have produced astounding results in competing with humans, in things like Go (game), Go, and ''Doom (franchise), Doom'' (which, being a first-person shooter game, has sparked some controversy).Big Data
Big data refers to a collection of data that cannot be captured, managed, and processed by conventional software tools within a certain time frame. It is a massive amount of decision-making, insight, and process optimization capabilities that require new processing models. In the Big Data Era written by Victor Meyer Schonberg and Kenneth L. Cooke, Kenneth Cooke, big data means that instead of random analysis (sample survey), all data is used for analysis. The 5V characteristics of big data (proposed by IBM): ''Volume'', ''Velocity'', ''Variety'', ''Value'', ''Veracity''. The strategic significance of big data technology is not to master huge data information, but to specialize in these meaningful data. In other words, if big data is likened to an industry, the key to realizing profitability in this industry is to increase the "process capability" of the data and realize the "value added" of the data through "processing power, processing".Artificial general intelligence
General intelligence is the ability to solve ''any'' problem, rather than finding a solution to a particular problem. Artificial general intelligence (or "AGI") is a program which can apply intelligence to a wide variety of problems, in much the same ways humans can. Ben Goertzel and others argued in the early 2000s that AI research had largely given up on the field's original goal of creating artificial general intelligence. AGI research was founded as a separate sub-field and by 2010 there were academic conferences, laboratories and university courses dedicated to AGI research, as well as private consortiums and new companies. Artificial general intelligence is also referred to as "strong AI", or seAdvanced Human Intelligence
where he defines strong AI as "machine intelligence with the full range of human intelligence." "full AI", or synthetic intelligence as opposed to "weak AI" or "narrow AI". (Academic sources reserve "strong AI" to refer to machines capable of experiencing consciousness.) Foundation models, which are large artificial intelligence models trained on vast quantities of unlabeled data that can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks, began to be developed in 2018. Models such as GPT-3 released by OpenAI in 2020, and Gato (DeepMind), Gato released by DeepMind in 2022, have been described as important milestones on the path to artificial general intelligence.
See also
* Outline of artificial intelligence ** Progress in artificial intelligence ** Timeline of artificial intelligence ** History of natural language processing * Timeline of machine learning * History of knowledge representation and reasoningNotes
References
* . * . * . * . * . * . * . * . * . * * . * . * . * . * . * . * . * . * * . * . * . * . * . * . * . * . * . * * * * * * * . * * With notes upon the Memoir by the Translator * * * * * * * * * * * .* * * . * . * . * . * . * . * . * . * . * . * . * . * . * . {{DEFAULTSORT:History Of Artificial Intelligence History of artificial intelligence, History of computing