History of Artificial Intelligence
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 classical 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 held on the campus of Dartmouth College 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 they had grossly underestimated the difficulty of the project. In 1973, in response to the criticism from James Lighthill and ongoing pressure from congress, the U.S. and British Governments stopped funding undirected research into artificial intelligence, and the difficult years that followed would later be known as an "AI winter". Seven years later, a visionary initiative by the Japanese Government inspired governments and industry to provide AI with billions of dollars, but by the late 80s the investors became disillusioned by the absence of the needed computer power (hardware) and withdrew funding again.
Investment and interest in AI boomed in the first decades of the 21st century, when machine learning 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 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 islands perimeter daily. According to pseudo-Apollodorus' Bibliotheke, Hephaestus forged Talos with the aid of a cyclops and presented the automaton as a gift to Minos. In the Argonautica, Jason and the Argonauts defeated him by way of a single plug near his foot which, once removed, allowed the vital ichor to flow out from his body and left him inanimate.
Pygmalion was a legendary king and sculptor of Greek Mythology, famously represented in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the 10th book of Ovid’s narrative poem, Pygmalion becomes disgusted with women when he witnesses the way in which the Propoetides 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 and fell in love with. Indeed the statue, Galatea, came to life and by some accounts she and Pygmalion conceived a child.
The Golem is an artificial being of Jewish Folklore, created from clay and-- depending on the source-- often given some sort of objective. The earliest written account regarding golem-making is found in the writings of Eleazar ben Judah of Worms circa 12-13th C. During the Middle Ages, it was believed that the animation of a Golem 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 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.[10] Predating Paracelsus was Jābir ibn Hayyān's take on the homunculus: Takwin[11] In Faust, The Second Part of the Tragedy by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 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.
Early-modern legendary automata
These automata legendary during the early modern period 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.
Modern fiction
By the 19th century, ideas about artificial men and thinking machines were developed in fiction, as in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or Karel Čapek's R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), and speculation, such as Samuel Butler's "Darwin among the Machines." AI has become a regular topic of science fiction through the present.
Automata
Realistic humanoid automata were built by craftsman from every civilization, including Yan Shi, Hero of Alexandria,[18] Al-Jazari , Pierre Jaquet-Droz, and Wolfgang von Kempelen.
The oldest known automata were the sacred statues of ancient Egypt and Greece. The faithful believed that craftsman had imbued these figures with very real minds, capable of wisdom and emotion—Hermes Trismegistus wrote that "by discovering the true nature of the gods, man has been able to reproduce it."
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, Indian and Greek 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 (who gave a formal analysis of the syllogism), Euclid (whose Elements was a model of formal reasoning), al-Khwārizmī (who developed algebra and gave his name to "algorithm") and European scholastic philosophers such as William of Ockham and Duns Scotus.
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, who redeveloped his ideas.
In the 17th century, Leibniz, Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes explored the possibility that all rational thought could be made as systematic as algebra or geometry. Hobbes famously wrote in Leviathan: "reason is nothing but reckoning". Leibniz envisioned a universal language of reasoning (his characteristica universalis) 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 hypothesis that would become the guiding faith of AI research.
In the 20th century, the study of mathematical logic 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 and Frege's Begriffsschrift. Building on Frege's system, Russell and Whitehead presented a formal treatment of the foundations of mathematics in their masterpiece, the Principia Mathematica 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's machine and Church'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 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
Main articles: history of computer hardware and history of computer science
Calculating machines were built in antiquity and improved throughout history by many mathematicians, including (once again) philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. 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 with the Engine.)
The first modern computers were the massive code breaking machines of the Second World War (such as Z3, ENIAC and Colossus). The latter two of these machines were based on the theoretical foundation laid by Alan Turing and developed by John von Neumann.
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