History of Artificial Intelligence & Data Science
Where everything began and where it will end
Conceivement (1500-1950)
Artificial intelligence is based on the assumption that the process of human thought can be mechanized. Greek philosophers (300 BC), such as Aristotle and Euclid, created the logical grounds for this. But the first Data Scientists were the alchemists of 1500 who tried to create artificial humans (“homunculus”) by mixing human blood with other things. In fact, literature is full of fascinating stories about them, like Goethe’s Faust (1790) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).
Having said that, if we really want to be poindexters, the earliest evidence of written mathematics dates back to the ancient Sumerians, who built the first civilization in Mesopotamia (3000 BC). Then, the Persian astronomer al-Khwārizmī developed algebra and gave his name to “algorithm” (800 BC).
Modern AI started in 1800 with the invention of Linear Regression. Good old German Gauss, which we all know and love, used it for determining the orbits of comets around the Sun. A few years later, English statistician Sir Galton coined the term “regression” for predicting pea growth and other biological phenomena. The name came from the fact that things tend to “regress towards the mean”. His work was…
