Artificial Intelligence: Working backwards from HAL
Published: 27 Mar 2006 15:40 BST
The phrase 'artificial intelligence' was first coined by John McCarthy at a conference at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, in 1956, but the concept of artificial, or machine, intelligence is in fact as old as the computer. The computer was, after all, initially developed during the Second World War to break codes that were too hard for humans and required high speed 'machine intelligence'.
It was one of the most celebrated of the Second World War code breakers, Alan Turing, a man who many would describe as the inventor of the first modern computer, who proposed in 1950 what has become known as the Turing Test. This simply said that we could consider a machine to be intelligent if its responses in some sort of conversation were indistinguishable from those of a human. It is this proposal that is seen by many not only as the definitive test of machine intelligence but also the point at which today's quest to develop artificial intelligence was born.
Three Laws of Robotics
In the early days of computing there had already been a great deal of optimism that machines could be created that would behave intelligently. In 1942 Isaac Asimov put forward his three laws of robotics in the short story Runaround, which was later republished as part of the short story collection, I, Robot. Not long after the book was published, one of the fathers of computing, John von Neumann said, "You insist that there is something that a machine can not do. If you tell me precisely what it is that a machine can not do, then I can always make a machine that can do just that."
This optimism was fuelled over the next few decades by the constantly increasing power and speed of computer hardware and by the success in applying computers to an ever-wider range of human endeavours. Many believed that as the computational power of machines increased they would soon be able to equal the intellectual power of a human being.
It is now over fifty years since the birth of artificial intelligence research, computing power is both fast and cheap, and yet today intelligent machines seem to as far in the future as they were half a century ago. According to those early researchers we should now be surrounded by intelligent machines, is this the case or are we still waiting?
A long road to intelligence
Work on machine intelligence started with chess, and Maniac 1, the first chess program to beat a human player, was demonstrated in 1956 by Stanislaw Ulam at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US. This was an early success in the quest for machine intelligence that started a long sequence of work on chess-playing computers by many researchers around the world.
In 1966 Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT developed the first computer program capable of engaging in a conversation with a human — Eliza. This clever program was able to hold a seemingly intelligent conversation with a human, and many felt that given enough computer power and a large enough vocabulary these algorithms would make it possible for a machine to meet Turing's test for intelligence.
Shakey, the first robot capable of locomotion, perception and problem solving was built at Stanford Research Institute, California, in 1969. This was followed in 1979 by the Stanford Cart, a computer controlled autonomous robot designed by Hans Moravec of Stanford university that was capable of successfully navigating around a room filled with furniture without bumping into any.
The success of these and other similar experiments in artificial intelligence gave researchers during the 1960s and 1970s the confidence that given enough computing power, and sufficient research funds, they would quite soon be able to develop an algorithm for...
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