When does a Robot
become an AI?
Further to this, a group of scientists conducted The Dartmouth
Conference in 1956. Led by Marvin
Minsky and John McCarthy, it was
arranged to show that “...every
aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can
be made to simulate it”. The conference ultimately coined the term
Artificial Intelligence.7 It was from
here that a series of major discoveries were made in the field of AI,
which resulted in millions of dollars
being spent on research around the
world.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) amounts
to simulating or re-creating the
way human beings think; learn
and adapt, through the implementation of computer circuitry and
software. In what is now regarded
as a landmark paper from 1950,
Alan Turing (a man you can find
out a lot more about in issue 3
of ISPECTRUM Magazine and the
Benedict-Cumberbatch-starring
film “The Imitation Game”), hypothesised that it would be possible to
create an electronic brain. He created an experimental process named
The Turing Test which was used to
postulate whether a machine could
think. While the test was somewhat limited by today’s standards,
it still gave rise to the plausibility
of a thinking machine, and became
the bedrock for the philosophy of
Artificial Intelligence that continues
to this day.
Though research into the progress
of Artificial Intelligence would accelerate and decelerate in the coming
decades, Alan Turing’s 1950 gauntlet would ultimately lead to the birth
of Expert Systems in the 1980s highly sophisticated AIs that were
programmed with extensive information directly from experts in a
particular subject matter. For the
first time, machines were capable of
a range of things in a specific subject area; rather than one bespoke
- usually experimental - service.
These systems were considered
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