History of AI
From iGeek
Since programming computers is error-ridden and time-consuming, we wondered if we could make them program themselves.
~ Aristotle Sabouni
Created: 2022-07-17 |
A brief history of AI might be as follows. Since programming computers is hugely time consuming, we started wondering if we could make them mimic our ability to learn.
- In 1950, Alan Turing had coined the idea that if a computer could fool us into thinking it was another human, then wasn't that intelligence (Known as the Turing Test)?
- This spawned a lot of philosophical debate into what intelligence really is, and whether machines could ever get it.
- The term (Artificially Intelligence) was coined in 1956 (Dartmouth Workshop), which was a conference on how to make machines "think". [1]
- Remember that many academic workshops are just a way to spend research money on a brainstorming conference, travel, and food, pondering futurism on the University's dime. And they accomplished? Nothing but a plan for more research, which yielded little tangible other than a few pipe-dreams about what the future might bring, and a framework for some terms (and study) that was later obsoleted. The technology and understanding just weren't mature enough to create anything more useful than cave dwellers' drawings pondering mechanical flight.
- There were a few more Breakthru's on ideas of how it might happen over the next couple of decades (and a lot wouldn't work), with fad cycles of money being poured into some potential "Breakthru" (AI "Springs": in that research money rained down), and that research didn't materialize anything of value and then the funding dried up (AI "Winters" like 1974-1980 and 1987-1993).
- As far as tangible accomplishments? 1956-1993 was the AI stone age, where a few nescient ideas and terms leaked out, but no real problems were getting solved, so there was no real market for it.
- In 1997, IBM's "Deep Blue" (Super Computer) became the first computer to beat a chess champion when it defeated Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov. But that wasn't really "learning"... it was taught all the possibilities in chess, and in a very specific game, one could win.
- A simpler but more thinking man's game is Go, and we don't have a computer that can beat the best Go players... yet. We probably will, but it's not like it's really thinking, as much as it's just solving a problem that we programmed it to.
- In 2011, IBM's Watson won the TV Quiz Show Jeopardy by beating reigning champions, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. Again, a huge database and being better on Trivia isn't quite "thinking", but that kind of problem-solving can be useful.
- In 2014, Eugene Goostman was a chatbot that was able to fool a few judges into thinking it was a human (beating the Turing test). [2]
- All of those were highly constrained games, where with enough resources you could program a computer to solve a problem, guess at the question (and answers), and convince people that you were a non-English speaking teenager. Knowing based on probability and large data sets which term/concept has the most matches (or how everyone that won a game of chess reacted when in the same piece configuration), or how to evade questions isn't really intelligence.
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