After this, the world has never been the same.
The world started to actually know what AI is recently, also due to the widespread of smart products such as autonomous-driving vehicles or useful vocal assistants. However, the inception of AI already occurred a long time ago.
Do you know when AI emerged?
There are several definitions of artificial intelligence. Alan Turing, a British mathematician and computer pioneer, said that a machine could be called “intelligent” if it could fool a human into thinking that it was another human. In other words, if you were to have an extended conversation with what you thought was another person and didn’t realize until later on that you had in fact been conversing with a machine, then the machine would be considered “intelligent.”
Turing suggested this idea in 1950 in his landmark paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence.
The paper also introduced the Turing Test as an answer to the question: Can machines think? The test requires an evaluator (a human) to interact with both a human and a machine through text messages only (i.e., no voice or visual cues). If the evaluator can’t tell which is which after five minutes of interaction — that is, if they decide there’s no significant difference between the responses of the two subjects — then we’d have to conclude that machines can indeed think.
How was the first-ever AI program written?
It was written in 1956 by John McCarthy and ran on an IBM 704 mainframe computer. The programming language it was written in, called List Processing Language or LISP, is still used today. The program attempted to solve problems in symbolic information processing (a branch of mathematics) and won third place in the 1958 International Mathematical Olympiad.
Useful AI literature
To really understand artificial intelligence and how it has changed our world, we need to read. In this section, we will describe some great books about artificial intelligence.
First of all, computers that think like humans are the subject of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Peter Norvig and Stuart Russell. This book is a comprehensive introduction to the theory and practice of artificial intelligence.
Next, any computer professional who wants to learn more about AI should read Artificial Intelligence for Games by Ian Millington and John Funge. This text explains AI techniques for games with examples drawn from various genres of games.
On the other hand, if you want to know about the history of AI, you should read The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos. This book provides an overview of machine learning algorithms developed over the past few decades.
Also, If you want to know what experts think about AI, then you should read Predictions 2035: Artificial Intelligence and Humans by John Smart is a good choice because in this book authors predict how human civilization will be affected by future technologies such as nanotechnology and artificial superintelligence (ASI).
Remarkable milestones
What are some milestones in AI history?
While there have been many milestones in the history of artificial intelligence, here are some of the most important ones:
- 1997 marked a historic moment when IBM’s chess-playing computer Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, one of the best human chess players.
- In 2011, IBM’s Watson defeated former Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a three-game match. Watson’s ability to answer natural language questions was an impressive step forward for artificial intelligence.
- In 2016, Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, a professional Go player ranked first in South Korea and ninth in the world. This major milestone showed that machines could compete at higher levels than previously thought possible.
- In 2017, AlphaGo Zero beat its predecessor AlphaGo 100 games to zero — after being trained from scratch with no human input and within just three days.
The self-driving cars question
In prior stories, we already covered the topic of the introduction and the establishment of autonomous vehicles.
The concept of self-driving cars was introduced as early as 1939 when General Motors premiered a Futurama exhibit at the New York World’s Fair that featured self-driving vehicles. In the 1980s and 1990s, Mercedes-Benz and Carnegie Mellon University were among those who began working on automated vehicles that could sense their surroundings. Since then, many companies have continued to work on this technology; here are just some of them:
- Waymo (partnered with Google)
- Uber
- Tesla
Depending on how much progress is made by each company during the development and testing phases, we can expect to see driverless cars hitting the road within one or two years — provided the right laws are put into place by then.
The world has been changed by AI
AI is widely used in the world.
In particular, AI technology has been applied to the field of education, and it plays an important role in e-learning. Its roles include acting as a teacher assistant and a personal tutor. In another situation, AI can also be used to act as a learner and analyze students’ learning patterns.
AI has changed our life. For example, recently Amazon’s Alexa has become popular in homes and offices around the world for its ability to play music videos at your request, turn off the lights in your home when you ask it to do so, order your favourite pizza from Dominos without having you pick up the phone or even get updates on traffic conditions before you set out for work through voice-controlled commands.
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