Arguably
the first modern, general purpose computer was created by German Konrad Zuse in
1941. Later, John William Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert Jr. created ENIAC
(electronic numerical integrator and computer), a mammoth (ten feet tall, a
thousand square feet, weighing thirty tons) device between 1943 and1946 at the
University of Pennsylvania. Soon after computers, “artificial intelligence” was
born.
The Logic Theorist, considered to be the
first instance of artificial intelligence, was developed in 1955 by Newell and
Simon, running their program on the JOHNNIAC computer created by John von
Neumann. The expression was coined in 1956 by John McCarthy, who organized a
summer research project called “The Dartmouth summer research project on
artificial intelligence”. In 1958, McCarthy created the LISP programming
language (LISt Processing), still widely used in artificial
intelligence programming today.
We
have seen A.I. creep more and more often into mainstream media, and our lives.
A famous chess duel between man and machine. A Spielberg film about a robot
child built to behave as a human. Assembly plants that construct cars with
great precision, and greater speed. Automated phone services, allowing people
to book plane tickets by speaking, not to a person, but to a series of
appropriately choreographed recordings. Although artificial intelligence has
been developing for fifty years, debates persist regarding just how far we’ve
come, and whether or not we’re even on the right track. What are the right
conditions under which we are to decide if a computer is in fact intelligent?
And does it need to be intelligent in the same way that humans are, to be of
any worth? Can a computer be conscious? Does whether or not it can matter?
One
of the first tests for intelligence was created in 1950 by Alan Turing, the
famous British mathematician whose major achievements include being considered
the father of modern computer science, and having cracked the seemingly
uncrackable German ENIGMA code during World War II. His A.I. test originally
involved an interrogator typing in a conversation with a man or a woman via
teletype, and being told he has to guess the sex of whoever was on the other
side. Turing argued that if a computer could be substituted for either the man
or woman without the interrogator noticing, then that computer could be
considered intelligent.
Over the last decades, the test has been misinterpreted, modified, and simplified to its common form: if you can’t tell the difference between a computer and a person (in a separate room, of course), the computer has passed the Turing test and can be considered intelligent. Despite the unquestioned brilliance of his mathematical work, his philosophy is much disputed. Two common criticisms of the Turing test are first that it’s too hard to pass, and second that even if a program could pass the test, that fact alone would not confirm intelligence, as the result could have been plausible on the surface but lacking a suitable, robust mechanism (often referred to as the Hollow Shell argument).
References / Further Reading:
If you wish to be the best man, you must suffer the bitterest of the bitter.
Posted by: moncler netherland | November 22, 2011 at 08:08 AM