Artificial Intelligence (1, #114) / 1 (ePub)

Thousands of years ago, Western, Indian, Chinese, and Greek philosophers proposed making machines and computers smarter. These philosophers attempted to characterize human thought as a symbolic system.

Their efforts saw some light when, in the 1940s, their line of thought led to the discovery of a machine based on the intellectual principle of mathematical reasoning. The programmable digital computer was the machine in question. The invention quickly inspired scientists all over the world, motivating them to work even harder to make intelligent machines a reality.

One of these scientists was John McCarthy, who coined the term "artificial intelligence" in 1956 at a conference he hosted at Dartmouth College. John McCarthy believed that if scientists banded together and combined their efforts, an intelligent machine could be created. He summoned a small group of scientists to discuss the possibility of them developing an electric brain, or intelligent machine.

Following the conference, participants concluded that it was possible to create a machine that could compete with human intelligence. The government liked the concept and agreed to fund the dream.

Because of hardware limitations, the scientists realized at the end of the 1960s that the project was more ambitious than they had anticipated. By that point, the government had had enough of them and withdrew financial support, signaling years of difficulty for Artificial Intelligence (AI) research (because there was because).

The Japanese government had a visionary initiative in the 1980s to support an expert system, which was further research towards AI. This prompted the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom to reintroduce funding for AI research. The research received billions of dollars, but governments ran out of patience while waiting for the researchers to meet their goals, and they withdrew their funding once more. Artificial intelligence is increasingly becoming a part of our daily lives. AI is being used extensively in retail stores, automobiles, and healthcare facilities.

All of the greatness and success of artificial intelligence did not happen by chance; it was the result of advanced development in a field known as machine learning.