A.I

Artificial intelligence, this is a word that has varying definitions depending on what era and whom you ask. A simple concept for hard coded programs back in the 70’s, with a today’s technological advancements its concept is a lot more complex and its applications endless. While we face moral issues with further pursuit to improve/evolve it and our implementations of it, it’s journey from its humble beginnings to the technical behemoth it is today has proven to be an exciting one, one which I am eager awaiting what exciting development is next.

The idea of artificial intelligence has existed for many generations, dating back even to ancient Chinese legends in 3rd century B.C. Receiving notable contributions from famous computer scientists such as Alan Turing, creator of the Turing test, Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch, who were the first to theorize the idea of neural networks, this field of study was not officially labelled until 1956. John McCarthy, held as the father of a.i, and Marvin Minsky, who built the first neural net machine the “SNARC”, organised the Dartmouth Conference. This was a pivotal moment in a.i history as a lot of key figures in a.i research in the proceeding decades were in attendance. Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon debuted the “Logic theorist” , a computer program that mirrored human problem-solving methodologies and is described as the first artificial intelligence program. The following years up to 1974 were labelled “The Golden Years” due to the rapid advances made in the field. This led to a wave of funding by the newly created Advanced Research Projects Agency (later known as DARPA), hoping to aid in the race to create the first true a.i. But the researchers failed to realize the true scope of the problem, that the computers available to them did not have the necessary computational power to process all decisions outside of simple games, nor did they have the tools to create large databases to feed these programs the necessary data to learn. This led to the first of two AI winters, in which investment dries up and A.I loses its trendiness only for it to bounce back a number of years later as the technology available increases in power. While these bounces did tarnish the reputation of A.I, it restored some of its pristine by completing some milestones such as Deep Blue defeating the worlds reigning chess champion in 1997 and the Stanford robot being the first to drive autonomously for 131 miles fin 2005. These successes were just the public projects, with AI programs or implementations of them were used by businesses and slowly being adopted more.