{"id":12365,"date":"2021-03-18T09:09:35","date_gmt":"2021-03-18T08:09:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.laval-virtual.com\/?p=12365"},"modified":"2021-03-18T09:43:22","modified_gmt":"2021-03-18T08:43:22","slug":"a-history-of-artificial-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.laval-virtual.com\/en\/a-history-of-artificial-intelligence\/","title":{"rendered":"A history of artificial intelligence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Between major discoveries and periods of disillusionment, battles between the supporters of the symbolic current and those of the connectionist current, Artificial Intelligence<\/a> (AI) has a long history. Over the last ten years, thanks in particular to power of computers and access to phenomenal data, AI has made an incredible step forward and constantly pushes back its limits. Here is a chronology of the major accomplishments.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Between technological advances and disillusionment<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

1950: Turing Test<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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In his article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” published in 1950, the brilliant Alan Turing and pionneer of artificial intelligence (which he called machine intelligence<\/strong> at the time) proposed to answer the following question: can a machine think?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The « Imitation Game<\/a> » inspired him, very popular at the British parties. In this game, a man and a woman hide in two different rooms, and must convince the guests they are the other by answering in writing the questions asked by the audience. For his test, Alan Turing replaced one of the humans by a machine. This test didn’t win unanimous support but nobody found a better answer to this question today: can a machine think?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

1956: Dartmouth Conference<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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If we had to pick a starting point in the story of artificial intelligence, Dartmouth could be it. Indeed, during this conference, the word “artificial intelligence” was used for the first time to describe this new domain. This 6-day event gathered about fifteen scientists including several who became major players in AI<\/strong>: John McCarthy (LISP language creator, pionneer of cloud computing), Marvin Minsky (cofounder with McCarthy of the Artificial Intelligence Group of MIT), Allen Newell and Herbet Simon, among others, who all won the Turing prize!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1957: The Perceptron<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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Attempt to imitate the internal mechanics of the brain with the creation of the first artifical neural networks called “perceptron”. Thanks to this process, its inventor, the American psychologist Frank Rosenblatt, simulates the learning abilities of the human brain on a computer. An important progress in the history of artificial intelligence and the beginnings of machine learning<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1966: The first mobile robot<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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In the United States, a team of the Stanford Research Institute<\/a> (SRI) developed Shakey, the first mobile robot<\/strong> who is able to reason on his own actions. Standing on three wheels, Shakey looks like something out of an old SF movie. But it is yet a true breakthrough for AI and robotics (its corollary): treatment of natural language to understand human instructions, research algorithms to follow its own tracks, sensors and computer vision to interprate the environment, a system of planification to prepare the next actions… The beginnings of autonomous cars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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