---

HISTORY OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

HOW DID ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE COME ABOUT?

The term artificial intelligence was coined in 1956, when a group of interested scientists met for an initial summer workshop. Those attending included Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, Marvin Minsky, Oliver Selfridge, and John McCarthy. Early work in AI consisted of attempts to simulate the Neural networks of the brain with numerically modeled nerve cells called perceptrons. Success was very limited due to the great complexity of the problem.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, scientists Newell, Simon, and J.C. Shaw offered their "logivcal theorist" computer program, and introduced symbolic processing.Instead of building systems based on numbers, they attempted to build systems that manipulated symbols. Their approach was powerful and is fundamental to most work in AI to this day. In it knowledge is expressed as rules. For example, " If x is a bird, then x can fly." If such an AI system determines or is told that a robin is a bird, then it can infer that the robin can fly.

Scores of AI systems have been built as a means for uncovering and facing the problems of produicing intelligent behavior. In the 1950s, a checker playing program capable of championship play was developed. In the 1960s, a program was developed that oculd prove theorems in Euclidean geometry. Another program was capable of solving analogy problems such as thos given on standard intelligence tests. In the late 1960s, a program was developed that could create a betting strategy for the card game, poker.

Explosive growth occured in the 1970s. Progress was made in the interpretation of visual input. A method was devloped for representing actions in a less ambiguous way, advancing the capabilities of programs which are able to understand natural language. A rudimentary speech recognition system, capable of identifying spoken words, was also developed.

.......................................................................................