Artificial Intellidence / wit Ref.

Essay by Ryankirkland April 2004

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Early Artificial Intelligence

The topic of Artificial Intelligence is not so much fiction today, as it was, maybe, 40 years ago. People then simply did not believe that a machine, or computer, could be made to think or even make logical decisions. Some argued that the human brain is not the only factor in the ability of a human to think and act like a human, but that the mind and soul is something so far from our grasp that recreating it in a machine is more than impossible. Humans have a free will, emotions, and the ability to think abstract. At that time, philosophers in the field of computer and technology would create tests with simple AI programs to prove to people that machines could think. If one could not tell the difference, or realize they were chatting with a computer, then what makes the task of making a computer think like a human an impossible task? The simple algorithm was named ELIZA, created in 1965, and it consisted of pre-programmed phrases aimed at a user, who would then respond and then ELIZA would take words from the sentence given by the user and manipulate them into another question.

It was not designed to be a smart program, but only to fool the unsuspecting computer user that they were talking to a human (a rather dumb, boring, and repetitive one). (http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/serengul/ML/brief-history-of-AI.html)

Early Development

As with most technological advancements, major early development of computer science was headed by the military, as early back as the 1940s. When technology progressed enough to make computers smaller and more capable, people became afraid of computers, and the fact that they could calculate math equations in seconds that would take a skilled mathematician minutes, even hours to solve. Fiction movies were made in the...