History of AI

History of AI

The seeds of modern AI were planted by classical philosophers who attempted to describe the process of human thinking as the mechanical manipulation of symbols. It was started in 1940s computer abstract was developed. The field of AI research was founded at a workshop held on the campus of Dartmouth College during the summer of 1956.[1] Those who attended would become the leaders of AI research for decades. Many of them predicted that a machine as intelligent as a human being would exist in no more than a generation and they were given millions of dollars to make this vision come true. Investment and interest in AI boomed in the first decades of the 21st century, when machine learning was successfully applied to many problems in academia and industry due to the presence of powerful computer hardware.

The birth of artificial intelligence

Handful of scientists in 40s and 50s from a variety of fields (mathematics, psychology, engineering, economics and political science) began to discuss the possibility of creating an artificial brain. The field of artificial intelligence research was founded as an academic discipline in 1956.

• Cybernetics and early neural networks

The earliest research into thinking machines was inspired by a confluence of ideas that became prevalent in the late 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s. Recent research in neurology had shown that the brain was an electrical network of neurons that fired in all-or-nothing pulses. Norbert Wiener's cybernetics described control and stability in electrical networks. Claude Shannon's information theory described digital signals (i.e., all-or-nothing signals). Alan Turing's theory of computation showed that any form of computation could be described digitally. The close relationship between these ideas suggested that it might be possible to construct an electronic brain.

Examples of work in this vein includes robots such as W. Grey Walter's turtles and the Johns Hopkins Beast. These machines did not use computers, digital electronics or symbolic reasoning; they were controlled entirely by analog circuitry. 

• . Game

In 1951, using the Ferranti Mark 1 machine of the University of Manchester, Christopher Strachey wrote a checkers program and Dietrich Prinz wrote one for chess.

1956 -1974 is known as golden era of ai in this period natural language  and robotics was developed. Many scientists conducted research and MIT received $2.2 from DARPA.

The field of AI, now more than a half a century old, finally achieved some of its oldest goals. It began to be used successfully throughout the technology industry, although somewhat behind the scenes. Some of the success was due to increasing computer power and some was achieved by focusing on specific isolated problems and pursuing them with the highest standards of scientific accountability. Still, the reputation of AI, in the business world at least, was less than pristine. Inside the field there was little agreement on the reasons for AI's failure to fulfill the dream of human level intelligence that had captured the imagination of the world in the 1960s. Together, all these factors helped to fragment AI into competing sub fields focused on particular problems or approaches, sometimes even under new names that disguised the tarnished pedigree of "artificial intelligence".AI was both more cautious and more successful than it had ever been.