History of Artificial Intelligence

Since Karel Capek's play in 1921, ‘Rossums Universal Robots’ coined the term ‘Robots’ in the English language as a term to describe the young inventor Rossum’s artificial version of humananity, the idea of robots and indeed artificial intelligence have been a fascination of mankind. The ancestry of modern artificial intelligence can traced far into ancient times, with the notion of artificial beings blessed ‘with conciseness and being’. It was after the invention of the programmable computer in the 1940’s that the idea of building a computer to mimic the workings of the human brain became a plausible theory to scientists.

In 1950 the father of modern computer science Alan Turing proposed the Turing Test in his paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’. This test worked on the basis that if a person could not tell the difference between communicating with a machine and communicating with human in another room, then we can call that machine an intelligent machine.

In 1956 John McCarthy coined the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ at the ‘Dartmoth Conference’ – the first conference dedicated to the idea.

In 1957 The General Problem Solver was demonstrated by Newell, Shaw & Simon. This was a machine which offered logical solutions to problems such as theorems and algebra.

In 1962 the first industrial robot company, Unimation, was founded. It produced a materials handling robot used mainly in the manufacturing industry.

In 1969 Shakey was built by SRI International. It became the first robot to apply reasoning to its own actions, and respond to commands.

In 1979 the Stanford Cart. This was the first computer controlled vehicle and required room sized computers for operation. The Cart’s main function was the ability to follow a white line drawn across a floor using its TV camera and other methods.

In more modern times robots have begun to capture the imagination of society more and more. The was most evident when in 1997 ‘The Deep Blue’ chess program took on and beat the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, in a widely followed match. This brought real life robotics to the masses.

Since then people have become familiar with many commercially available robotic toys which utilise the wonders of artificial intelligence. Examples include ‘Furby’ and the phenomenon which was the ‘Tomagotchi ‘.