History of AI
History of AI
----------> Origins
The Greek myth of Pygmalion is the story of a statue brought to life for the love of her sculptor. The Greek god Hephaestus' robot Talos guarded Crete from attackers, running the circumference of the island 3 times a day. The Greek Oracle at Delphi was history's first chatbot and expert system.
In the 3rd century BC, Chinese engineer Mo Ti created mechanical birds, dragons, and warriors. Technology was being used to transform myth into reality.
Much later, the Royal courts of Enlightenment-age Europe were endlessly amused by mechanical ducks and humanoid figures, crafted by clockmakers. It has long been possible to make machines that looked and moved in human-like ways - machines that could spook and awe the audience - but creating a model of the mind was off limits.
Many of the leading thinkers of the 18th and 19th century were convinced that a formal reasoning system, based on a kind of mathematics, could encode all human thought and be used to solve every sort of problem. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was sure that such a system existed, and only needed to be discovered. The idea still has currency - the history of recent artificial intelligence is replete with stories of systems that seek to "axiomatize" logic inside computers.
George Boole introduces the "Laws of Thought"
From 1800 on, the philosophy of reason picked up speed. George Boole proposed a system of "laws of thought," Boolean Logic, which uses "AND" and "OR" and "NOT" to establish how ideas and objects relate to each other. Most Internet search engines use Boolean logic in their searches; you can say that you want all the pages about "dolphins NOT (Miami OR football)" to find all the pages about dolphins which don't mention the Miami Dolphins football team.
Philosophers focus their attention on the problems of logic
In the 20th century, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead published Principia Mathematica, which turned formal logic on its
----------> Origins
The Greek myth of Pygmalion is the story of a statue brought to life for the love of her sculptor. The Greek god Hephaestus' robot Talos guarded Crete from attackers, running the circumference of the island 3 times a day. The Greek Oracle at Delphi was history's first chatbot and expert system.
In the 3rd century BC, Chinese engineer Mo Ti created mechanical birds, dragons, and warriors. Technology was being used to transform myth into reality.
Much later, the Royal courts of Enlightenment-age Europe were endlessly amused by mechanical ducks and humanoid figures, crafted by clockmakers. It has long been possible to make machines that looked and moved in human-like ways - machines that could spook and awe the audience - but creating a model of the mind was off limits.
Many of the leading thinkers of the 18th and 19th century were convinced that a formal reasoning system, based on a kind of mathematics, could encode all human thought and be used to solve every sort of problem. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was sure that such a system existed, and only needed to be discovered. The idea still has currency - the history of recent artificial intelligence is replete with stories of systems that seek to "axiomatize" logic inside computers.
George Boole introduces the "Laws of Thought"
From 1800 on, the philosophy of reason picked up speed. George Boole proposed a system of "laws of thought," Boolean Logic, which uses "AND" and "OR" and "NOT" to establish how ideas and objects relate to each other. Most Internet search engines use Boolean logic in their searches; you can say that you want all the pages about "dolphins NOT (Miami OR football)" to find all the pages about dolphins which don't mention the Miami Dolphins football team.
Philosophers focus their attention on the problems of logic
In the 20th century, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead published Principia Mathematica, which turned formal logic on its