AI History
The concept of intelligent machines is found in Greek
mythology. There is a story in the 8th century A.D about Pygmalion
Olio, the legendary king of Cyprus. He fell in love with an ivory statue he
made to represent his ideal woman. The king prayed to the goddess Aphrodite,
and the goddess miraculously brought the statue to life.
Other myths involve
human-like artifacts. As a present from Zeus to Europa, Hephaestus created
Talos, a huge robot. Talos was made of bronze and his duty was to patrol the
beaches of Crete.
Aristotle (384-322 BC) developed an informal system of syllogistic
logic, which is the basis of the first formal deductive reasoning system.
Early in the 17th century, Descartes proposed
that bodies of animals are nothing more than complex machines.
Pascal in 1642 made the first mechanical digital calculating
machine.
In the 19th century, George Boole developed a binary
algebra representing (some) "laws of thought."
Charles Babbage & Ada Byron worked on programmable
mechanical calculating machines.
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, mathematical
philosophers like Gottlob Frege, Bertram Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and
Kurt Gödel built on Boole's initial logic concepts to develop mathematical
representations of logic problems.
The advent of electronic computers provided a revolutionary
advance in the ability to study intelligence.
In 1943 McCulloch & Pitts developed a Boolean circuit
model of brain. They wrote the paper “A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in
Nervous Activity”, which explained how it is possible for neural networks to
compute.
Marvin Minsky and Dean Edmonds built the SNARC in 1951, which
is the first randomly wired neural network learning machine (SNARC stands for
Stochastic Neural-Analog Reinforcement Computer).It was a neural network
computer that used 3000 vacuum tubes and a network with 40 neurons.
In 1950 Turing wrote an article on “Computing Machinery and
Intelligence” which articulated a complete vision of AI. For more on Alan
Turing see the site http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/
Turing’s paper talked of many things, of solving problems by
searching through the space of possible solutions, guided by heuristics. He
illustrated his ideas on machine intelligence by reference to chess. He even
propounded the possibility of letting the machine alter its own instructions so
that machines can learn from experience.
In 1956 a famous conference took place in Dartmouth. The
conference brought together the founding fathers of artificial intelligence for
the first time. In this meeting the term “Artificial Intelligence” was adopted.
Between 1952 and 1956, Samuel had developed several programs
for playing checkers. In 1956, Newell & Simon’s Logic Theorist was
published. It is considered by many to be the first AI program.
In 1959, Gelernter
developed a Geometry Engine. In 1961 James Slagle (PhD dissertation, MIT) wrote
a symbolic integration program, SAINT. It was written in LISP and solved
calculus problems at the college freshman level.
In 1963, Thomas Evan's
program Analogy was developed which could solve IQ test type analogy problems.
In 1963, Edward A. Feigenbaum & Julian Feldman published
Computers and Thought, the first collection of articles about artificial
intelligence.
In 1965, J. Allen Robinson invented a mechanical proof
procedure, the Resolution Method, which allowed programs to work
efficiently with formal logic as a representation language.
In 1967, the Dendral program (Feigenbaum, Lederberg,
Buchanan, Sutherland at Stanford) was demonstrated which could interpret
mass spectra on organic chemical compounds. This was the first successful
knowledge-based program for scientific reasoning.
In 1969 the SRI robot,
Shakey, demonstrated combining locomotion, perception and problem solving.
The years from 1969 to 1979 marked the early development of knowledge-based
systems
In 1974: MYCIN demonstrated the power of rule-based systems
for knowledge representation and inference in medical diagnosis and therapy.
Knowledge representation schemes were developed. These included frames
developed by Minski. Logic based languages like Prolog and Planner were
developed.
In the 1980s, Lisp Machines developed and marketed.
Around 1985, neural networks return to popularity
In 1988, there was a resurgence of probabilistic and
decision-theoretic methods
The early AI systems used general systems, little knowledge.
AI researchers realized that specialized knowledge is required for rich tasks
to focus reasoning.
The 1990's saw major advances in all areas of AI including
the following:
• machine learning, data mining
• intelligent tutoring,
• case-based reasoning,
• multi-agent planning, scheduling,
• uncertain reasoning,
• natural language understanding and
translation,
• vision, virtual reality, games, and
other topics.
Rod Brooks' COG Project at MIT, with numerous collaborators,
made significant progress in building a humanoid robot
The first official Robo-Cup soccer match featuring table-top
matches with 40 teams of interacting robots was held in 1997. For details, see
the site http://murray.newcastle.edu.au/users/students/2002/c3012299/bg.html
In the late 90s, Web crawlers and other AI-based information
extraction programs become essential in widespread use of the world-wide-web.
Interactive robot pets ("smart toys") become
commercially available, realizing the vision of the 18th century novelty toy
makers.
In 2000, the Nomad robot explores remote regions of
Antarctica looking for meteorite samples.
We
will now look at a few famous AI system that has been developed over the years.
1. ALVINN:
Autonomous Land
Vehicle In a Neural Network
In 1989, Dean Pomerleau at CMU created ALVINN. This is
a system which learns to control vehicles by watching a person drive. It
contains a neural network whose input is a 30x32 unit two dimensional camera
image. The output layer is a representation of the direction the vehicle should
travel.
The system drove a car from the East Coast of USA to the west
coast, a total of about 2850 miles. Out of this about 50 miles were driven by a
human, and the rest solely by the system.
2. Deep Blue
In 1997, the Deep Blue chess program
created by IBM, beat the current world chess champion, Gary Kasparov.
3. Machine translation
A system capable of translations
between people speaking different languages will be a remarkable achievement of
enormous economic and cultural benefit. Machine translation is one of the
important fields of endeavor in AI. While some translating systems have been
developed, there is a lot of scope for improvement in translation quality.
4. Autonomous agents
In space exploration, robotic space
probes autonomously monitor their surroundings, make decisions and act to
achieve their goals.
NASA's Mars rovers successfully completed their primary
three-month missions in April, 2004. The Spirit rover had been exploring a
range of Martian hills that took two months to reach. It is finding curiously
eroded rocks that may be new pieces to the puzzle of the region's past.
Spirit's twin, Opportunity, had been examining exposed rock layers inside a
crater.
5. Internet agents
The explosive growth of the internet has also led to growing
interest in internet agents to
monitor users' tasks, seek needed information, and to learn
which information is most useful
For more information the reader may consult AI in the news:
