History of Computers - Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence
The term Artificial Intelligence was coined by John McCarthy. It is the idea of making computers sentient and intelligent beings like humans.
Overview
Artificial intelligence is what it sounds like, a computer that has fake intelligence, such that it mimics the humans ability to learn and adapt. The field of artificial intelligence was founded in the 1950s, when Alan Turing and his contemporaries were exploring questions of whether a machine could think, or at least imitate the behavior of a human. The Turing Test was created by Turing as a way to determine whether a computer is capable of imitating human behavior. Subsequent thought experiments such as Searle's Chinese Room have expanded on the idea of what it means for a machine to be intelligent. People began working on artificial intelligence when it was thought that a computer could be built to think like a human. Google, Facebook, Apple and others companies have all been developing A.I. tools, although they are only fledgling forms of the technology. [1] Currently, there are AIs with evolving algorithms that learn and change themselves with new data, but there are no truly sentient computers as seen in science fiction.
Significance
AI's have become a key part of our society by doing tasks that would otherwise be too hard to do by human hand. AI's can be seen in market monitoring and automated trading. [2] AI's showed their dominance when Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in chess[3], and when Watson defeated Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in the popular game show Jeopardy!.[4] Other tasks AI are commonly found doing are customer service jobs. The fact that AI's can answer a customers question with relative accuracy and ensure give humans a lot to look forward to. The only detriment is the economical effect AI's will have when jobs start being taken by computers. In 2014, researches at the University of Gothenburg developed an AI system that learns like a new born child. "We have developed a program that can learn, for example, basic arithmetic, logic, and grammar without any pre-existing knowledge," says Claes Strannegård. [5] The researches programmed the AI to find common patterns in math situations. For example if 3 X 0 = 0 and 4 X 0 = 0 then the computer will know that 5 X 0 = 0 as well.
