Download The History of Artificial Intelligence

Nicholas Hardman 03014084 – Biology Inspired Computing Essay
The History of Artificial Intelligence
Introduction
When you hear Artificial Intelligence, the thing that usually springs to mind is
robots with free will living amongst us. This is why some people believe it is
impossible to achieve and take the opinion Artificial Intelligence is the ‘lunatic
fringe’ of computer science.
What is Intelligence and can it be created?
www.dictionary.com defines it as ‘The capacity to acquire and apply
knowledge ‘.The saying ‘Practice makes perfect’ is commonly used because it
is a well know fact that the more you do something, the better at it you
become. If a computer is capable of this behaviour then it is intelligent.
History
Egyptian folklore refers to robots living amongst humans but they imagined them to be made out of
stone. The idea of creating life like machines is an old one that has raised a number of ethical
concerns as time has gone by.
In 1640, Descartes argued that although machines can pass as animals, they can never pass as
humans
Blaise Pascal invented the numerical wheel calculator aside this
paragraph in 1642 at the age of 18. This is where the automation of
mathematics begins.
In 1822, Charles Babbage invented the difference engine which is regarded as the first computer.
The first modern computer was 120 years later in 1941.
Isaac Asimov publishes his Three Laws of Robotics in 1942.
1 – A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human
being to come to harm
2 – A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where
such orders would conflict with the First Law
3 – A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does
not conflict with the First or Second Law.
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Nicholas Hardman 03014084 – Biology Inspired Computing Essay
1946 First electronic computer—ENIAC
ENIAC was designed to compute ballistics tables without many
tedious electronic calculations. It was made programmable to allow the
same electronic hardware to operate in different ways without
changing any wires.
1950s: The Space Age
Allen Newell, J.C.Jaw, Simon and Herbert created the Logic Theorist which solved problems by
presenting a problem as a tree of options and chose the route with the best outcome. This proved 38
of the 52 presented theories to be true.
In an attempt to answer the question ‘How do we tell if a machine is intelligent?’, Alan Turing
developed the Turing test where you type messages into a computer and it attempt to distinguish if
the responses are from a human or a computer.
In 1951, the first commercial computer was made. It was called UNIVAC and as you can see from
the picture below, it was absolutely huge!
The name Artificial Intelligence came from John McCarthy in 1956 when he ran the ‘Dartmouth
Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence’ which brought together the founders of AI.
This research project aimed to simulate how the human brain works in order to program a robot to
adapt to its environment.
1957 – The Sputnik satellite was launched
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Nicholas Hardman 03014084 – Biology Inspired Computing Essay
1958 Lisp created by McCarthy. Lisp is a model of a functional programming language used today.
I found Lisp to be fast, efficient, ugly and difficult to use. See the associated file – Comparison of
depth first to breadth first search algorithms. (Searches in lisp.doc)
1960s: The Age of Reason
Research on AI began at MIT and Carnegie Mellon University.
Unimation, the first industrial robot company started in 1962
1962 Frank Rosenblatt, a school friend of Marvin Minsky proved that a Perceptron (SLP1)
(BELOW) could be trained to find optimal weights in finite time, provided certain conditions were
met. This opened the door to neural networking.
Bernard Widrow & Marcian Hoff generalized this proof slightly for their ADALINE system.
ADAptive LINear Elements
In 1963, the United States Department of Defence Advance Research gave 2.2 Million dollars to
MIT for a research project lead by Marvin Minsky
The first commercial minicomputer was released in 1965
1968 Early industrial robots introduced and the Microworld program was announced
1969 Man landed on the moon. The Commercial microprocessor became available which brought
the digital world outside of a computer.
1970s: The Romantic Movement
An early advancement of expert systems showed the world a huge potential on computing. Case
based reasoning compares new cases against the old cases to predict the outcome.
Daniel G Bobrow created ‘student’ by which could solve algebra and word problems
David Marr proposed new theories on machine vision
The pocket calculator was created at invented in 1970
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Nicholas Hardman 03014084 – Biology Inspired Computing Essay
1971 Terry Winograd created ‘SHRDLU’ at MIT to
understand any meaningful English sentence about
coloured blocks. It proved that a computer is capable of
understanding and interpreting any pre defined world.
An example of somebody talking to SHRDLU.
The earliest video games were released in 1972. Not very entertaining but look how much they have
developed over time. Also, during 1972 a programming language named “Prolog” (PROgram
LOGic). I have used prolog to create a knowledge base about the solar system. You ask questions in
a certain format and it queries the knowledge base and returns the results.
The First microcomputer (On the right) was released in 1975 and was called
Altair 880. It had 64 KB of memory and an open 100-line bus structure. It
sold for about $400 in a kit to be assembled by the user. Using this kit, 2
college students named Paul Allen and Bill Gates wrote the interpreter for
the language BASIC in 8 weeks coding day and night. During the summer,
they started Microsoft.
Also in 1975, Brian Kerninghan and Dennis Ritchie developed C, the most
popular application development language
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Nicholas Hardman 03014084 – Biology Inspired Computing Essay
It was around this time that the first multi layer neural network was developed giving a computer
the ability to understand information far beyond the capacity of the human brain.
In 1978 Personal Computers became available in the United Kingdom. This led to growth of
interest in artificial intelligence and the start of the American association for artificial intelligence
1980s: The Enlightenment
The computer impact hit the world as companies learned how much money they could save with the
efficiency of computers. Between over 150 companies $1 billion was spent on artificial intelligence
research
By 1985 over 100 companies offered machine vision and sales reached $80 million
Over 1986 $425 million in AI hardware is sold
1987 the demand dropped and the industry lost half a billion
Xcon – a system to program VAX computer (Below)
1989 The US tried developing the smart truck, an automated battle field robot but the project
funding was cut due to project setbacks and the unlikely success
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Nicholas Hardman 03014084 – Biology Inspired Computing Essay
1990s: The Gothic Revival
During this period Development of machine learning, intelligent tutoring, case-based reasoning,
multi-agent planning, scheduling, uncertain reasoning, data mining, natural-language understanding
and translation, vision, virtual reality, games
It was at the start of the 1990’s when the internet came into place. The National Science Foundation
Network made ARPANET the backbone of the internet.
In 1991, DARPA reported that an AI-based logistics planning tool, DART, was used in military
operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm which repaid decades of research.
1997 was a mile stone for Artificial Intelligence that showed the world the potential of computer
software. IBM developed an Expert system named Deep Blue which became famous when it beat
Gary Kasparov world chess champion in a game of chess.
Towards the end of 1990’s we saw the introduction of Web crawlers and other AI-based
information extraction programs like the internet search engine Google and packet routing software
which has become essential to widespread use of the Web
2000 – The New Millennium
The New Millennium brought “Smart Toys” like the ‘firby’ to the world, pet robots that can learn
and Lego Mindstorm to allow children to begin programming and build robots.
The thought of robots that look like humans living amongst us takes another step forward when Dr.
Cynthia Breazeal from MIT, published a dissertation on social machines and introduced “Kismet”
(Below) a robot with a face that is capable of expresses emotions.
2000 Nomad robot explores remote part of Antarctica looking for Meteorite samples
2004 The Japanese are working on a robot that can build the framework of a house by spraying
cement like a printer sprays ink
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Nicholas Hardman 03014084 – Biology Inspired Computing Essay
Conclusion
Despite the setbacks of over ambitious failed projects, the field ploughs ahead with commercially
successful projects being released every year. The biggest commercial success has been expert
systems which can hand advise a nurse dealing with something she hasn’t learned about of what to
do based on information about 1000’s of rare diseases or tell a advise a company what to expect
when something is about to hiccup in the stock market. With expert system shells in place, any
programmer can make these applications without the need of Artificial Intelligence experts.
Most of the research comes from the military but it is utilised around the world. Intelligent
protection systems in cars use machine vision to reduce road accidents, MI6 use AI in Speech
recognition to protect us from terrorists and NASDAQ use it for fraud detection
So, Can artificial intelligence be created? It depends on what you are waiting for. Intelligent
systems are in place now helping people out all over the world but if you are waiting for a robot like
‘Data’ off the T.V. show Star Trek, then we still have a lot of work to do.
References
Lecture notes
University of Luton – Search and Control of AI lecture notes
Books
An introduction to Artificial intelligence by Janet Finlay and Alan Dix
Websites
Expert System
SHRDLU
Logic Theorist
http://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~eroberts/cs91/projects/ethics-of-ai/sec2_1.html
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~harnish/ai.html
http://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~eroberts/cs91/projects/ethics-of-ai/sec1_2.html
Arithmetic Machine http://www.maxmon.com/1640ad.htm
ENIAC
http://photos.si.edu/infoage/infoage.html
Isaac Asimov
http://www.androidworld.com/prod22.htm
Microprocessors http://www.glencoe.com/norton/n-instructor-/appendix/history/history.html
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