ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

HISTORY OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

 Artificial Intelligence – History of Artificial Intelligence

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 Artificial Intelligence – History of Artificial Intelligence

INDEX

INDEX ............................................................................................................................................................................ 3

1. INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................................................... 4

2. AI’S BEGINNINGS .................................................................................................................................................... 5

3. 50S-60S ..................................................................................................................................................................... 8

4. 60S-70S ................................................................................................................................................................... 10

4.1 ELIZA................................................................................................................................................................... 10
4.2 General Problem Solver (GPS) ........................................................................................................................... 10
4.3 List Processor (LISP) ........................................................................................................................................... 10
4.4 Microworlds ......................................................................................................................................................... 11
4.5 Perceptron ........................................................................................................................................................... 11

5. 80S-90S AND THE “WINTER AI” ........................................................................................................................... 12

6. FROM THE 2000S TO THE PRESENT ................................................................................................................... 14

7. REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................................................ 17

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1. INTRODUCTION
Throughout this unit we will talk about the history of AI, from its birth in the mid-1950s to current
days. For each decade, we will highlight the may advances, most renowned researchers and the
techniques developed.

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2. AI’S BEGINNINGS
As we already mentioned in the Introduction unit, AI became popular thanks to computers. Before
that union,there were only philosophical current or some essays about whether it was possible to
integrate intelligence to beings that did not have it. Researchers thought it would be a strong
union. Nevertheless, the first works did not emerge until 1950 with the arrival of Alan Turing.

Alan Turing (1912-1954) was a British mathematical scientist of great reputation. He is considered
the father of theoretical computing and AI.

Sin World War 2, Turing worked at Bletchley Park [1], the governments secret headquarters
where mathematicians and engineers worked on decoding radio messages from the Germans.
Germans used a machine called Enigma to encrypt their messages. Therefore, Turing devised
and built “The Turing Bombe” machine, which as able to automatically decrypt those messages
whenever each of its coils was configured with the right key (it changed daily).

Illustration 1: Picture of Alan Turing.

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Illustration 2: Replica of The Turing Bombe which can be seen in Bletchley Park.

The machine was composed of a certain number of coils that acted as states once configured
with the supposed daily key. To decipher each letter, we would only have to follow the path
indicated by those states and find the equivalent decrypted letter. The Turing machine is
considered the first computer machine in history. It made it possible to speed up the interpretation
of the messages in code and, as a consequence, shorten the duration of the war and win it.

Alan Turing’s contribution to science did not end there. After the war, he worked for several
universities as a computer mathematician. In late the 1940s, he was researching the possibility
of a machine imitation the behavior of the human mind. This research, entitled “Computing
Machinery and Intelligence”, was published in 1950 in volume 59 of Mind magazine [2] generating,
within the guild, a great admiration and curiosity before such a futuristic and abstract approach.

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In this scientific article, Turing proposes what then was known as “the Turing test. We will talk
about it further on. The grandeur of his proposal brought together the worlds of mathematics,
logic, algorithms and computing to create new fields in the area of artificial intelligence (although
he never gave it a name).

Alan Turing’s works, both in his time within the British intelligence and academic years, can be
found in Bletchley Park; located half an hour from London by train.

Illustration 3: The statue in honor of Alan Turing can be visited in Bletchley Park.

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3. 50S-60S
In 1956, in the “Darmouth Summer Research Conference on Artificial Intelligence”[3] artificial
intelligence is recognized as an area within computing. The conference featured leading figures
from the computer world, such as John McCarthy, Marvin L. Minsky, Claude E. Shannin, Herbert
Simon and Allen Newell. The conference served , among other things, to define the future lines
of work of this new field under mutual agreement.

The guidelines were summarized as follows: “Every aspect of learning or any other feature of
intelligence can be defined so precisely that a machine can be buuilt tos timulate it.” In this way,
researchers focused on developing abstract models based on computational and mathematical
reasoni.

Illustration 4: John McCarthy

Illustration 5: Marvin Minsky

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Illustration 6: Claude E.Shannon

Ilustraction 7: Herbert Simon and Allen Newell

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4. 60S-70S
Following the establishment of these broad lines for progress in the field of AI, the years that
followed were both encouraging and disappointing at the same time. There were some
improvements, but they took longer than expected and both the press, and public and private
funds began to question the value of artificial intelligence as the years passed.

At the least, the the field was promising, especially at the beginning of the 1960s and, as
mentioned above, work was done on projects that advanced in interacting bots (ELIZA [4]),
solving problems through algorithms (GPS [5]), microworlds, perceptron [6], LISP [7], etc. These
are briefly described below.

4.1 ELIZA

It was a computer program developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Boston,

USA) that stimulated a psychologist (machine) attending a patient (user). It was able to process
the text received as input and offer a response. The answer quality was variable; it did not work
well with idioms or implicit sentences.

4.2 General Problem Solver (GPS)

Devised by Simon and Newell, their main objective was to solve any logical problem in a
generalist way, in other words, without being designed a priori for it. The only requirement was
that the user enter the allowed movements and the initial knowledge base. GPS would be able to
develop a heuristic to solve it and get from the initial state to the end (goal).

4.3 List Processor (LISP)

Invented by McCarthy, it is one of the oldest programming languages that focused o solving
problems by handling lists with data. All sentences start with a parenthesis, close with another
and follow the Polish notation (operands first , data or variables later. Nowadays, it is very strange
to work with this language because of its complexity to learn it. It is part of the family of functional
programming languages.

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4.4 Microworlds

This idea was developed by Minsky and Papiert and was based on the scope of the system to
work on their intelligence. Since being able to have a being be smart and autonomous was
unattainable and the researchers were very preliminary. If you worked in a controlled environment
where you could only do a set of actions that generated elements in that microworld, it would be
easier to develop an intelligent system for it.

4.5 Perceptron

Its creator was Rosenblatt. It is the base or simplest network of artificial neuron networks used
today to solve problems with Machine Learning or Deep Learning. Perceptron is a mathematical
model composed of elements interconnected between them called “neurons” (given their
similarity with them). This network is able to lean after a series of iterative workouts and an
activation function. This will be explained further along the course. Regarding its history,
perceptron represented a great advance in the field but it did not obtain the expected results when
the network became larger and more complex. Its scalability problems represented a loss of
confidence and popularity in the development technique.

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5. 80S-90S AND THE “WINTER AI”

After the boom, fervor and promising future awakened by AI, by the end of the 1970s, research
and projects were not progressing as quickly as expected. Researchers work in a more mature
and cautious way; project proposal are no longer as greedy. AI evolves into a more applied terrain
and sets aside such generalist theoretical and abstract models.

Most of the research focuses on developing expert systems, which, as the name suggests,
specialize in a specific field in order to provide answers to question on the topic using a previously
established knowledge base. These are used as decision support systems, for example, to detect
pathologies or risk of fraud or non-payment.

Despite this, the press expressed its skepticism towards all these failed promises and delays in
the implementation of projects that combined an AI capable of doing almost anything
autonomously. In addition, public and private funds that supported these research lines began to
cut or even cancel projects given their poor viability. AI bubble began to collapse, and in 10984,
during the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Minsky and Schank coined the
term “AI Winter” (the winter of artificial intelligence) to refer to this phenomenon that began in the
mid-1970s and lasted until the mid-1990s, while warning researchers, companies and institutions
of the dangers that it entailed and the wisdom that would have to be maintained from now on in
order to be able to advance in the field.

In 1996, pessimism about AI took a turn for the better thanks to IBM, which caught the attention
of the press and the general public with its “Deep Blue” supercomputer [8]. The system was able
to perform parallelized computation, so even the calculations, so even the calculations went faster
than working with a computer in use. To draw the attention, the company thought to challenge
Gary Kasparov, world chess champion at the time, to six games. Deep Blue won the 4-2 and the
second time, in 1997, 6-0. The impact of such event was worldwide and, once again, AI aroused
that widespread interest that had been lost over the years, even though Kasparov had to wait a
long time for the machine to decide the next move.

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Illustration 8: Kasparov and Deep Blue competing in a chess game.

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6. FROM THE 2000S TO THE PRESENT

During the 2000s artificial intelligence was taking small steps forward. From time to time, it caught
the general population’s attention alongside robotics. The launching of
assistant robots started this decade. At the same time [9], HONDA was
the first one to capture the attention from everyone. Its main function
was to assist people with reduced mobility in their tasks. Many others
emerged alongside Asimo, such as the SONY robot dog named Aibo
or later the robot Nao from Aldebaran Robotics [10] (now Softbank
Robotics). The main problem faced by the companies was the high
cost of production and sale of the robots. This is why the iRobot
Roomba robot was luckier, as the only function it performs is to clean
the floor and therefore the entire production line is cheaper.

Another breakthrough was made in 2004 by the US Defense Agency,

DARPA, when it launched the DARPA Grand Challenge [11] to the scientific community. It was a
challenge with a $1 million reward for the team that managed to drive a 4x4 car autonomously in
the desert. The course had 12 miles and all the participating cars would run at the same time. As
a result, great interest was generated for the autonomous vehicle and autonomous driving, as
well as towards the field of artificial vision to process the environment in real time.

Illustration 9: Stanley car from DARPA Grand Challenge

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At the same time that all these advances and events happened, distributed computing is gaining
more strength. If a computer has multiple processors, I can parallelize parts of my program to run
it faster. That’s how the scalability of the systems improved in general and helped artificial
intelligence in particular. All lines of research on neuron networks, search algorithms, speech
recognition, image etc. that had stopped due to scalability problems had a new place thanks to
this technological advance.

In 2010 we started talking about Machine Learning and Big Data: the mass processing of data
arrived. Artificial intelligence came out of the purely scientific realm to integrate and grow in
companies. In the digital age, ownership of users' data meant power and money and companies
like Google were first to implement it. Free products for the public in exchange for capturing each
of the movements of users in order to further refine and customize the product. Because of this,
most companies focus on the user.

Since 2015, the popularity of artificial intelligence has grown so strong that no one can imagine a
life without it. A new line of research is emerging called Deep Learning, inspired by the neuron
networks of the 1980s but much more powerful at the computational level, which puts the entire
ecosystem on alert. In 2016 the company DeepMind, later bought by Google, managed to beat
the world champion of Go 5-0 using this technique through its Alpha Go system [12]. Go is
considered one of the most complex games by the combinatorial explosion of its movements.
This combinatorial explosion is the weak point of any computer and with Deep Learning has been
minimized.

For all these reasons, the most active field at the moment is Deep Learning in the academic field
and the digital transformation through Machine Learning/Big Data in the business sphere. Finally,
we show two graphs of the popularity they have had in the Google search engine over the years
"artificial intelligence" and "artificial intelligence jobs". As previously mentioned, from 2015 the
popularity is increasing to the present day.

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Illustration 10: Graph generated with Google Trends where the upward trend of searches related to Artificial
Intelligence takes place from 2015.

Illustration 11: Graph created with Google Trend where we can see a big demand of professionals with AI
knowledge as of 2015.

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7. REFERENCES
[1] Bletchley Park https://bletchleypark.org.uk/

[2] A. M. Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Mind, New Series, Vol. 59, No. 236 (Oct., 1950), pp. 433-
460 http://phil415.pbworks.com/f/TuringComputing.pdf

[3] J. McCarthy, M. L. Minsky, N. Rochester, and C. E. Shannon, A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research
Project on Artificial Intelligence, AI Magazine Vol. 27 Number 4 (2006).
https://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/1904/1802

[4] J Weizenbaum, ELIZA—a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and
machine- Communications of the ACM, Volume 9, Number 1 (January 1966): 36-35
http://www.academia.edu/download/31085335/ElizaScript.pdf
[5] A. Newell, J.C. Shaw, H. A. Simon Report on a General Problem Solving program (1958)
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/rand/ipl/P-1584_Report_On_A_General_Problem-
Solving_Program_Feb59.pdf

[6] Rosenblatt, F. (1958). The perceptron: A probabilistic model for information storage and organization in the
brain. Psychological Review, 65(6), 386-408.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.335.3398&rep=rep1&type=pdf

[7] J. McCarthy, Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part
I, Communications of the ACM, 1960 http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.pdf
[8] IBM Deepblue http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/deepblue/

[9] Robot Asimo http://asimo.honda.com/

[10] SoftBank Robotics https://www.softbankrobotics.com/emea/en/index

[11] Darpa GRAND Challenge https://www.darpa.mil/

[12] Alpha Go, Deepmind https://deepmind.com/research/alphago/

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