Computers and Artificial Intelligence

Hank Curtis & Kim Martin

Updated: 2/24/2000

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the area of computer science focusing on creating machines that can engage in behaviors that humans consider intelligent. The ability to create intelligent machines has intrigued humans since ancient times, and today with the advent of the computer and 50 years of research into AI programming techniques, the dream of smart machines is becoming a reality. Researchers are creating systems which can mimic human thought, understand speech, beat the best human chessplayer, and countless other feats never before possible. However, the definition of what constitutes AI appears to change as it develops. In other words, when a computer does something intelligent, that performance is no longer deemed as AI.

  • Alan Turing - one of the great pioneers of the computer field, who inspired the now common terms of "The Turing Machine" and "Turing's Test."
    • Turing believed that an intelligent machine (the "Turing Test") could be created by following the blueprints of the human brain. The test consisted of a person asking questions via keyboard to both a person and an intelligent machine. He believed that if the person could not tell the machine apart from the person after a reasonable amount of time, the machine was somewhat intelligent. This test has become the 'holy grail' of the artificial intelligence community.

  • Marvin Minsky - Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, is often identified as one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence.
    • Minsky made major contributions to the scientific foundations of AI in the domains of symbolic description, knowledge representation, computational semantics and linguistics, machine perception, symbolic and connectionist learning, mechanical robotics, and industrial automation.
  • Norbert Weiner
    • Weiner had an extraordinarily wide range of interests and contributed to many areas including cybernetics (a term he coined), stochastic processes, quantum theory and during World War II he worked on gunfire control.
    • "Cybernetics is the study of the interaction between man, machine and animals" - Norbert Wiener 1964
    • Cybernetics is concerned with complex interacting systems and their control, particularly where the transfer of information is an essential component.The ultimate purpose of the information is to engineer physical action such as traction, heating, illumination or information acquisition.

  • Allen Newell - defined a framework in which to interrelate cognitive architectures and define intelligence.
    • Keeping with Newell's definition of intelligence "as the ability to use ones knowledge to achieve ones goals", SOAR (an architecture for intelligent problem solving and learning) provides a basis for continued research on knowledge acquisition systems, a unified theory of human cognition, human-computer interaction, and the efficiency of production systems. Other contributions to computer science include list processing, computer description languages, and psychologically based models of human/computer interaction.
  • Herbert Simon - centrally concerned with cognitive psychology, and the use of the computer to simulate human thinking
    • Simon produced a number of computer programs capable of reproducing historically important scientific discoveries, showing that symbolic information processing systems can account for the discovery of laws and new concepts, and can simulate such human processes as "intuition."
    • A founding father of modern research in artificial intelligence and the co-author, with the late Allen Newell, of the General Problem Solver program.

  • John McCarthy - founding father of artificial intelligence
    • set up the first AI Laboratory in 1957
    • invented LISP, the preeminent AI programming language, and frst proposed general-purpose time sharing of computers.
    • LISp characterized by the following ideas: computing with symbolic expressions rather than numbers, representation of symbolic expressions and other information by list structure in the memory of a computer, representation of information in external media mostly by multi-level lists

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