Artificial Intelligence | Page 3

in some of these tasks.
• In Computer vision, the systems are capable of face recognition
• In Robotics, we have been able to make vehicles that are mostly autonomous.
• In Natural language processing, we have systems that are capable of simple machine
translation.
• Today’s Expert systems can carry out medical diagnosis in a narrow domain
• Speech understanding systems are capable of recognizing several thousand words
continuous speech
• Planning and scheduling systems had been employed in scheduling experiments with
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the Hubble Telescope.
• The Learning systems are capable of doing text categorization into about a 1000 topics
• In Games, AI systems can play at the Grand Master level in chess (world champion),
checkers, etc.

What can AI systems NOT do yet?
• Understand natural language robustly (e .g., read and understand articles in a
newspaper)
• Surf the web
• Interpret an arbitrary visual scene
• Learn a natural language
• Construct plans in dynamic real-time domains
• Exhibit true autonomy and intelligence

1.2 AI History
Intellectual roots of AI date back to the early studies of the nature of knowledge and
reasoning. The dream of making a computer imita te humans also has a very early history.

The concept of intelligent machines is found in Greek mythology. There is a story in the
8th century A.D about Pygmalion Olio, the legendary king of Cyprus. He fell in love with
an ivory statue he made to represent his ideal woman. The king prayed to the goddess
Aphrodite, and the goddess miracu lously brought the statue to life. Other myths involve
human-like artifacts. As a present from Zeus to Europa, Hephaestus created Talos, a huge
robot. Talos was made of bronze and his duty was to patrol the beaches of Crete.

Aristotle (384-322 BC) developed an informal system of syllogistic logic, which is the
basis of the first formal deductive reasoning system.

Early in the 17th century, Descartes proposed that bodies of animals are nothing more
than complex machines.

Pascal in 1642 made the first mech anical digital calculating machine.

In the 19th century, George Boole developed a binary algebra representing (some) "laws
of thought."

Charles Babbage & Ada Byron worked on programmable mechanical calculating
machines.

In the late 19th century and early 20th century, mathematical philosophers like Gottlob
Frege, Bertram Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and Kurt Gödel built on Boole's initial
logic concepts to develop mathematical representations of logic problems.

The advent of electronic computers provided a revolutionary advance in the ability to
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study intelligence.

In 1943 McCulloch & Pitts developed a Boolean circuit model of brain. They wrote the
paper “A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity”, which explained
how it is possible for neural networks to compute.

Marvin Minsky and Dean Edmonds built the SNARC in 1951, which is the first
randomly wired neural network learning mach ine (SNARC stands for Stochastic Neural-
Analog Reinforcement Computer).It was a ne ural network computer that used 3000
vacuum tubes and a network with 40 neurons.

In 1950 Turing wrote an article on “Compu ting Machinery and Intelligence” which
articulated a complete vision of AI. Fo r more on Alan Turing see the site
http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/

Turing’s paper talked of many things, of solving problems by searching through the space
of possible solutions, guided by heuristics. He illustrated his ideas on machine
intelligence by reference to chess. He ev en propounded the possibility of letting the
machine alter its own instructions so that machines can learn from experience.

In 1956 a famous conference took place in Dartmouth. The conference brought together
the founding fathers of artificial intelligence for the first time. In this meeting the term
“Artificial Intellig ence” was adopted.

Between 1952 and 1956, Samuel had developed several programs for playing checkers.
In 1956, Newell & Simon’s Logic Theorist was published. It is considered by many to be
the first AI program. In 1959, Gelernter developed a Geometry Engine. In 1961 James
Slagle (PhD dissertation, MIT) wrote a sy mbolic integration program, SAINT. It was
written in LISP and solved calculus problems at the college freshman level. In 1963,
Thomas Evan's program Analogy was devel oped which could solve IQ test type
analogy problems.

In 1963, Edward A. Feigenbaum & Julian Feldman published Computers and Thought,
the first collection of articles about artificial intelligence.

In 1965, J. Allen Robinson invented a mechanical proof procedure, the Resolution
Method, which allowed programs to work efficiently with formal logic as