history of artificial intelligence (AI)

Theoretical work

The earliest substantial work in the field of artificial intelligence was done in the mid-20th century by the British logician and computer pioneer Alan Mathison Turing. In 1935 Turing described an abstract computing machine consisting of a limitless memory and a scanner that moves back and forth through the memory, symbol by symbol, reading what it finds and writing further symbols. The actions of the scanner are dictated by a program of instructions that also is stored in the memory in the form of symbols. This is Turing’s stored-program concept, and implicit in it is the possibility of the machine operating on, and so modifying or improving, its own program. Turing’s conception is now known simply as the universal Turing machine. All modern computers are in essence universal Turing machines.

During World War II Turing was a leading cryptanalyst at the Government Code and Cypher School in Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, England. Turing could not turn to the project of building a stored-program electronic computing machine until the cessation of hostilities in Europe in 1945. Nevertheless, during the war he gave considerable thought to the issue of machine intelligence. One of Turing’s colleagues at Bletchley Park, Donald Michie (who later founded the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception at the University of Edinburgh), later recalled that Turing often discussed how computers could learn from experience as well as solve new problems through the use of guiding principles—a process now known as heuristic problem solving.

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Turing gave quite possibly the earliest public lecture (London, 1947) to mention computer intelligence, saying, “What we want is a machine that can learn from experience,” and that the “possibility of letting the machine alter its own instructions provides the mechanism for this.” In 1948 he introduced many of the central concepts of AI in a report entitled “Intelligent Machinery.” However, Turing did not publish this paper, and many of his ideas were later reinvented by others. For instance, one of Turing’s original ideas was to train a network of artificial neurons to perform specific tasks, an approach described in the section Connectionism.

Chess

At Bletchley Park Turing illustrated his ideas on machine intelligence by reference to chess—a useful source of challenging and clearly defined problems against which proposed methods for problem solving could be tested. In principle, a chess-playing computer could play by searching exhaustively through all the available moves, but in practice this is impossible because it would involve examining an astronomically large number of moves. Heuristics are necessary to guide a narrower, more discriminative search. Although Turing experimented with designing chess programs, he had to content himself with theory in the absence of a computer to run his chess program. The first true AI programs had to await the arrival of stored-program electronic digital computers.

In 1945 Turing predicted that computers would one day play very good chess, and just over 50 years later, in 1997, Deep Blue, a chess computer built by IBM (International Business Machines Corporation), beat the reigning world champion, Garry Kasparov, in a six-game match. While Turing’s prediction came true, his expectation that chess programming would contribute to the understanding of how human beings think did not. The huge improvement in computer chess since Turing’s day is attributable to advances in computer engineering rather than advances in AI: Deep Blue’s 256 parallel processors enabled it to examine 200 million possible moves per second and to look ahead as many as 14 turns of play. Many agree with Noam Chomsky, a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who opined that a computer beating a grandmaster at chess is about as interesting as a bulldozer winning an Olympic weightlifting competition.

The Turing test

In 1950 Turing sidestepped the traditional debate concerning the definition of intelligence by introducing a practical test for computer intelligence that is now known simply as the Turing test. The Turing test involves three participants: a computer, a human interrogator, and a human foil. The interrogator attempts to determine, by asking questions of the other two participants, which is the computer. All communication is via keyboard and display screen. The interrogator may ask questions as penetrating and wide-ranging as necessary, and the computer is permitted to do everything possible to force a wrong identification. (For instance, the computer might answer “No” in response to “Are you a computer?” and might follow a request to multiply one large number by another with a long pause and an incorrect answer.) The foil must help the interrogator to make a correct identification. A number of different people play the roles of interrogator and foil, and, if a sufficient proportion of the interrogators are unable to distinguish the computer from the human being, then (according to proponents of Turing’s test) the computer is considered an intelligent, thinking entity.

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In 1991 the American philanthropist Hugh Loebner started the annual Loebner Prize competition, promising $100,000 to the first computer to pass the Turing test and awarding $2,000 each year to the best effort. However, no AI program has come close to passing an undiluted Turing test. In late 2022 the advent of the large language model ChatGPT reignited conversation about the likelihood that the components of the Turing test had been met. BuzzFeed data scientist Max Woolf said that ChatGPT had passed the Turing test in December 2022, but some experts claim that ChatGPT did not pass a true Turing test, because, in ordinary usage, ChatGPT often states that it is a language model.

The first AI programs

The earliest successful AI program was written in 1951 by Christopher Strachey, later director of the Programming Research Group at the University of Oxford. Strachey’s checkers (draughts) program ran on the Ferranti Mark I computer at the University of Manchester, England. By the summer of 1952 this program could play a complete game of checkers at a reasonable speed.

Information about the earliest successful demonstration of machine learning was published in 1952. Shopper, written by Anthony Oettinger at the University of Cambridge, ran on the EDSAC computer. Shopper’s simulated world was a mall of eight shops. When instructed to purchase an item, Shopper would search for it, visiting shops at random until the item was found. While searching, Shopper would memorize a few of the items stocked in each shop visited (just as a human shopper might). The next time Shopper was sent out for the same item, or for some other item that it had already located, it would go to the right shop straight away. This simple form of learning is called rote learning.

The first AI program to run in the United States also was a checkers program, written in 1952 by Arthur Samuel for the prototype of the IBM 701. Samuel took over the essentials of Strachey’s checkers program and over a period of years considerably extended it. In 1955 he added features that enabled the program to learn from experience. Samuel included mechanisms for both rote learning and generalization, enhancements that eventually led to his program’s winning one game against a former Connecticut checkers champion in 1962.

Evolutionary computing

Samuel’s checkers program was also notable for being one of the first efforts at evolutionary computing. (His program “evolved” by pitting a modified copy against the current best version of his program, with the winner becoming the new standard.) Evolutionary computing typically involves the use of some automatic method of generating and evaluating successive “generations” of a program, until a highly proficient solution evolves.

A leading proponent of evolutionary computing, John Holland, also wrote test software for the prototype of the IBM 701 computer. In particular, he helped design a neural-network virtual rat that could be trained to navigate through a maze. This work convinced Holland of the efficacy of the bottom-up approach to AI, which involves creating neural networks in imitation of the brain’s structure. While continuing to consult for IBM, Holland moved to the University of Michigan in 1952 to pursue a doctorate in mathematics. He soon switched, however, to a new interdisciplinary program in computers and information processing (later known as communications science) created by Arthur Burks, one of the builders of ENIAC and its successor EDVAC. In his 1959 dissertation, for what was likely the world’s first computer science Ph.D., Holland proposed a new type of computer—a multiprocessor computer—that would assign each artificial neuron in a network to a separate processor. (In 1985 Daniel Hillis solved the engineering difficulties to build the first such computer, the 65,536-processor Thinking Machines Corporation supercomputer.)

Holland joined the faculty at Michigan after graduation and over the next four decades directed much of the research into methods of automating evolutionary computing, a process now known by the term genetic algorithms. Systems implemented in Holland’s laboratory included a chess program, models of single-cell biological organisms, and a classifier system for controlling a simulated gas-pipeline network. Genetic algorithms are no longer restricted to academic demonstrations, however; in one important practical application, a genetic algorithm cooperates with a witness to a crime in order to generate a portrait of the perpetrator.

Logical reasoning and problem solving

The ability to reason logically is an important aspect of intelligence and has always been a major focus of AI research. An important landmark in this area was a theorem-proving program written in 1955–56 by Allen Newell and J. Clifford Shaw of the RAND Corporation and Herbert Simon of Carnegie Mellon University. The Logic Theorist, as the program became known, was designed to prove theorems from Principia Mathematica (1910–13), a three-volume work by the British philosopher-mathematicians Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. In one instance, a proof devised by the program was more elegant than the proof given in the books.

Newell, Simon, and Shaw went on to write a more powerful program, the General Problem Solver, or GPS. The first version of GPS ran in 1957, and work continued on the project for about a decade. GPS could solve an impressive variety of puzzles using a trial and error approach. However, one criticism of GPS, and similar programs that lack any learning capability, is that the program’s intelligence is entirely secondhand, coming from whatever information the programmer explicitly includes.

English dialogue

Two of the best-known early AI programs, Eliza and Parry, gave an eerie semblance of intelligent conversation. (Details of both were first published in 1966.) Eliza, written by Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT’s AI Laboratory, simulated a human therapist. Parry, written by Stanford University psychiatrist Kenneth Colby, simulated a human experiencing paranoia. Psychiatrists who were asked to decide whether they were communicating with Parry or a human experiencing paranoia were often unable to tell. Nevertheless, neither Parry nor Eliza could reasonably be described as intelligent. Parry’s contributions to the conversation were canned—constructed in advance by the programmer and stored away in the computer’s memory. Eliza, too, relied on canned sentences and simple programming tricks.

AI programming languages

In the course of their work on the Logic Theorist and GPS, Newell, Simon, and Shaw developed their Information Processing Language (IPL), a computer language tailored for AI programming. At the heart of IPL was a highly flexible data structure that they called a list. A list is simply an ordered sequence of items of data. Some or all of the items in a list may themselves be lists. This scheme leads to richly branching structures.

In 1960 John McCarthy combined elements of IPL with the lambda calculus (a formal mathematical-logical system) to produce the programming language LISP (List Processor), which for decades was the principal language for AI work in the United States, before it was supplanted in the 21st century by such languages as Python, Java, and C++. (The lambda calculus itself was invented in 1936 by Princeton logician Alonzo Church while he was investigating the abstract Entscheidungsproblem, or “decision problem,” for predicate logic—the same problem that Turing had been attacking when he invented the universal Turing machine.)

The logic programming language PROLOG (Programmation en Logique) was conceived by Alain Colmerauer at the University of Aix-Marseille, France, where the language was first implemented in 1973. PROLOG was further developed by the logician Robert Kowalski, a member of the AI group at the University of Edinburgh. This language makes use of a powerful theorem-proving technique known as resolution, invented in 1963 at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois by the British logician Alan Robinson. PROLOG can determine whether or not a given statement follows logically from other given statements. For example, given the statements “All logicians are rational” and “Robinson is a logician,” a PROLOG program responds in the affirmative to the query “Robinson is rational?” PROLOG was widely used for AI work, especially in Europe and Japan.

Microworld programs

To cope with the bewildering complexity of the real world, scientists often ignore less relevant details; for instance, physicists often ignore friction and elasticity in their models. In 1970 Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert of the MIT AI Laboratory proposed that, likewise, AI research should focus on developing programs capable of intelligent behavior in simpler artificial environments known as microworlds. Much research has focused on the so-called blocks world, which consists of colored blocks of various shapes and sizes arrayed on a flat surface.

An early success of the microworld approach was SHRDLU, written by Terry Winograd of MIT. (Details of the program were published in 1972.) SHRDLU controlled a robot arm that operated above a flat surface strewn with play blocks. Both the arm and the blocks were virtual. SHRDLU would respond to commands typed in natural English, such as “Will you please stack up both of the red blocks and either a green cube or a pyramid.” The program could also answer questions about its own actions. Although SHRDLU was initially hailed as a major breakthrough, Winograd soon announced that the program was, in fact, a dead end. The techniques pioneered in the program proved unsuitable for application in wider, more interesting worlds. Moreover, the appearance that SHRDLU gave of understanding the blocks microworld, and English statements concerning it, was in fact an illusion. SHRDLU had no idea what a green block was.

Another product of the microworld approach was Shakey, a mobile robot developed at the Stanford Research Institute by Bertram Raphael, Nils Nilsson, and others during the period 1968–72. The robot occupied a specially built microworld consisting of walls, doorways, and a few simply shaped wooden blocks. Each wall had a carefully painted baseboard to enable the robot to “see” where the wall met the floor (a simplification of reality that is typical of the microworld approach). Shakey had about a dozen basic abilities, such as TURN, PUSH, and CLIMB-RAMP. Critics pointed out the highly simplified nature of Shakey’s environment and emphasized that, despite these simplifications, Shakey operated excruciatingly slowly; a series of actions that a human could plan out and execute in minutes took Shakey days.

The greatest success of the microworld approach is a type of program known as an expert system, described in the next section.

Knowledge and inference

The basic components of an expert system are a knowledge base, or KB, and an inference engine. The information to be stored in the KB is obtained by interviewing people who are expert in the area in question. The interviewer, or knowledge engineer, organizes the information elicited from the experts into a collection of rules, typically of an “if-then” structure. Rules of this type are called production rules. The inference engine enables the expert system to draw deductions from the rules in the KB. For example, if the KB contains the production rules “if x, then y” and “if y, then z,” the inference engine is able to deduce “if x, then z.” The expert system might then query its user, “Is x true in the situation that we are considering?” If the answer is affirmative, the system will proceed to infer z.

Some expert systems use fuzzy logic. In standard logic there are only two truth values, true and false. This absolute precision makes vague attributes or situations difficult to characterize. (For example, when, precisely, does a thinning head of hair become a bald head?) Often the rules that human experts use contain vague expressions, and so it is useful for an expert system’s inference engine to employ fuzzy logic.

DENDRAL

In 1965 the AI researcher Edward Feigenbaum and the geneticist Joshua Lederberg, both of Stanford University, began work on Heuristic DENDRAL (later shortened to DENDRAL), a chemical-analysis expert system. The substance to be analyzed might, for example, be a complicated compound of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. Starting from spectrographic data obtained from the substance, DENDRAL would hypothesize the substance’s molecular structure. DENDRAL’s performance rivaled that of chemists expert at this task, and the program was used in industry and in academia.

MYCIN

Work on MYCIN, an expert system for treating blood infections, began at Stanford University in 1972. MYCIN would attempt to diagnose patients based on reported symptoms and medical test results. The program could request further information concerning the patient, as well as suggest additional laboratory tests, to arrive at a probable diagnosis, after which it would recommend a course of treatment. If requested, MYCIN would explain the reasoning that led to its diagnosis and recommendation. Using about 500 production rules, MYCIN operated at roughly the same level of competence as human specialists in blood infections and rather better than general practitioners.

Nevertheless, expert systems have no common sense or understanding of the limits of their expertise. For instance, if MYCIN were told that a patient who had received a gunshot wound was bleeding to death, the program would attempt to diagnose a bacterial cause for the patient’s symptoms. Expert systems can also act on absurd clerical errors, such as prescribing an obviously incorrect dosage of a drug for a patient whose weight and age data were accidentally transposed.

The CYC project

CYC is a large experiment in symbolic AI. The project began in 1984 under the auspices of the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, a consortium of computer, semiconductor, and electronics manufacturers. In 1995 Douglas Lenat, the CYC project director, spun off the project as Cycorp, Inc., based in Austin, Texas. The most ambitious goal of Cycorp was to build a KB containing a significant percentage of the commonsense knowledge of a human being. Millions of commonsense assertions, or rules, were coded into CYC. The expectation was that this “critical mass” would allow the system itself to extract further rules directly from ordinary prose and eventually serve as the foundation for future generations of expert systems.

With only a fraction of its commonsense KB compiled, CYC could draw inferences that would defeat simpler systems. For example, CYC could infer, “Garcia is wet,” from the statement, “Garcia is finishing a marathon run,” by employing its rules that running a marathon entails high exertion, that people sweat at high levels of exertion, and that when something sweats, it is wet. Among the outstanding remaining problems are issues in searching and problem solving—for example, how to search the KB automatically for information that is relevant to a given problem. AI researchers call the problem of updating, searching, and otherwise manipulating a large structure of symbols in realistic amounts of time the frame problem. Some critics of symbolic AI believe that the frame problem is largely unsolvable and so maintain that the symbolic approach will never yield genuinely intelligent systems. It is possible that CYC, for example, will succumb to the frame problem long before the system achieves human levels of knowledge.