Ai Turns Fifty: Revisiting Its Origins

Abstract

& The expression ''artificial intelligence'' (AI) was introduced by John McCarthy, and the official birth of AI is unanimously considered to be the 1956 Dartmouth Conference. Thus, AI turned fifty in 2006. How did AI begin? Several differently motivated analyses have been proposed as to its origins. In this paper a brief look at those that might be considered steps towards Dartmouth is attempted, with the aim of showing how a number of research topics and controversies that marked the short history of AI were touched on, or fairly well stated, during the year immediately preceding Dartmouth. The framework within which those steps were taken was the development of digital computers. Earlier computer applications in areas such as complex decision making and management, at that time dealt with by operations research techniques, were important in this story. The time was ripe for AI's intriguingly tumultuous development, marked as it has been by hopes and defeats, successes and difficulties.As is well known, the 1956 summer Dartmouth Conference on AI was preceded by a preparatory document dated August 31, 1955, whose authors were John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon. The meeting's aim was to examine ''the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it,'' as one reads in the document (McCarthy et al. 1955). Some of the main pioneers in computer programming were present at Dartmouth, such as Allen Newell, Arthur Samuel, Oliver Selfridge, and Herbert Simon. After Dartmouth, the historical centers of AI research would be formed: at Carnegie-Mellon University with Newell and Simon, at MIT with Minsky, and at Stanford This paper is based on a talk given at the 9th Congress of AI Ã IA, Milan, September 21-23, 2005. I would like to thank Stefania Bandini and Luigia Carlucci Aiello for inviting me. I had the opportunity to present an analogous talk in other places, and to further discuss the main topics of the present paper. I would like to express my thanks to

Searching in a Maze, in Search of Knowledge: Issues in Early Artificial Intelligence

“…In those years it was the choice-making processes themselves which came under the scrutiny of one pioneer of organisation theory and Operations Research (OR), Herbert Simon (von Neumann and Morgenstern's quotation above is borrowed from a paper by Simon). Elsewhere I have discussed in some detail how placing these decision-making processes at the centre means there is a shift of interest in disciplines dedicated to studying decision-making behaviour -a shift which includes a renunciation of the normative approach of mathematical game theory, and a move to the study of actual choice processes (see [11]). Briefly, the normative approach consists of an analysis of the choices (or strategies) that the rational agent should adopt to arrive at the optimal solution to a problem.…”

“…From here stems the insufficiency in limiting ourselves to the simple actual or overt behaviour of the subject and, in computer simulation or modelling, to the state space. I have discussed elsewhere which are the theoretical constructs used in this thoughtprocess theory and the controversial questions it has brought up (see [11]]). Here I would like to look briefly at a notion at the centre of both this process theory and AI: alternative space-representations.…”

“…for a given context or world. The point at issue here is that this knowledge had to be expressed in an explicit way in the form of sentences of first-order logic, rather than being embodied into the selection rules of the program 11 .…”

“…Other programs from around the same time, published in the collection Representation and Meaning, edited by Simon and Siklóssy [59], were moving in the same direction, where knowledge and semantics were acquiring a more dominant 11 The main difference between the Advice Taker and the heuristic programs of the time (LT and the GEOMETRY MACHINE) "is that in the previous programs the formal system was the subject matter, but the heuristics were all embodied in the program. In [the Advice Taker] the procedures will be described as much as possible in the language itself and, in particular, the heuristics are all so described" (see [28] p. 77).…”

Evaluating artificial intelligence in medicine: phases of clinical research

“… 1 The term was coined by John McCarthy in 1956 at a Dartmouth conference. 2 Twenty years later, the field entered the “AI Winter,” a consequence of optimistic promises and failures to keep them. 3 As AI makes possible applications that can learn, adapt, and predict, blooming interest in AI offers the promise of an “AI Spring.” 4–6 However, recent events also reveal unexpected risks of AI.…”