Artificial Intelligence - The History

Introduction: The idea of creating an inanimate objects coming to life as an intelligent being had been around for quite long time. It is even said that the ancient Greeks had myths about robots, and Chinese and Egyptian engineers had been looking to built automatons. The new beginnings to the modern AI technologies can be traced by the classical philosophers’ who attempts to describe human thinking as a symbolic system for a greater future.

We will now see what made them to make such a statement by having a look at the year wise AI advancements:

Initial stage of Artificial Intelligence (1943 - 1952)

• Year 1943: This was the first time when the term AI was first recognised and this was done by Warren MacCulloch and Walter pits. They proposed the model called as the Artificial Intelligence.
  

• Year 1949: Donald Hebb first demonstrated an updating rule for modifying the connection strength between the neurons. The same rule is called as the Hebbian learning.
  

• Year 1950: The Alan Turing, who was an English mathematician and the pioneer of Machine Learning in 1950. He publishes a test called as the “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” A test which tests the machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour that is equivalent to human intelligence.
  

The birth of Artificial Intelligence (1952 - 1956)

• Year 1955: A year in which Allen Newell and Hobert A Simon created the first ever artificial intelligence program.” This was named as the “Logic Theorist”. This program had then proved 38 of 52 Mathematics theorems and find new and much more elegant proofs for some theorems.

• Year 1956: The word “Artificial Intelligence” was first adopted by an American Computer scientist John McCarthy at the Dartmouth Conference. This was the first time, when AI was even coined to be an academic field.

One of the MIT’s cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky along with others who attended the conference were extremely optimistic about AI's future. They taught that "Within a generation of time, the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved,”

Those were the time when high level computer languages such as the FORTRAN, LISP or COBOL for the first time was invented. And the enthusiasm for AI was also very high at that point of time.

The golden year - the time when the enthusiasm were high (1956 -1974)

• Year 1966: The researchers highlighted the importance of developing algorithms which cam solve the mathematical problems. Joseph Weizenbaum created the first chatbot in 1966 which was names ad the ELIZA.
  

• Year 1972: The first intelligent ever humanoid robot was built in Japan which was named as the WABOT-1.

The water for AI (1974-1980)

• The period from 1974 to 1980 was considered to be the winter duration of the AI. AI winter refers to the time period where the computer scientist where hit with a severe shortage of fundings from the government for the AI researchers.
  

• During this period, there was a lot of criticism and the interest of publicity on artificial intelligence was also decreasing.
  

A boom of AI (1980 - 1987)

• Year 1980: After the AI winter, it did come back strongly with an “Expert System.” The expert system were programmed which could emulate the decision-making ability of a human expert.
  

• In the year 1980, the first ever conference of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence was held at the Stanford University at the national level.
  

The Second AI winter (1987 - 1993)

• The time between the years 1987 to 1973 was the called as the second AI Winter duration.
  

• Because of some reason, the investors and government stopped in funding for AI research due its high cost with no efficient result. The expert system such as XCON was very very cost effective.

The rise of intelligent agents (1993 - 2011)

• Year 1997: In the year 1997, IBM Deep Blue went on to become a chess champion by beating one of the greats Gary Kasparov, and became the first computer to bear a work class chess champion.
  

• Year 2002: This was the year wherein for the first time AI entered the home in the form of a Roomba, a vacuum cleaner.
  

• Year 2006: AI until 2002 or for the first time entered the home but during this period, it started to being used in the companies. Companies like, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix etc started implementing AI to their business.

AI, Machine Learning and Big Data post 2011:

• Year 2011: In the year 2011, IBM’s Watson won the jeopardy, which was a quiz show, where it had to solve the complex questions as well as the riddles. Watson had proved that it could even understand the natural language and also tricky questions were solved quickly.
  

• Year 2012: For the first time, Google had launched an Android app with a feature called as the “Google Now”, which could provide information to its users as a prediction.
  

• Year 2014: Like we already discussed, Chatbot “Eugene Goostman” had won a competition in the infamous “Turing test.”
  

• Year 2018: The “Project Debater” from the IBM debated on the complex topics with two master debaters and also performed extremely well.
  

• Google had demonstrated an AI program called as the “Duplex” which was a virtual assistant and it had taken the hairdresser appointment on call and the lady on the other side codlin’t even notice that it was a machine who was talking to her.

Now in 2021, we can see that AI has developed and is at a remarkable level. The concept of Deep learning, Big Data and data science are now trending like a boom. As discussed, companies like Google, Facebook, IBM and Amazon are working with AI and are creating amazing devices that are shocking the world. The future of Artificial Intelligence is inspiring and will come with high intelligent.