Listen to this articleThe birth of the Artificial Intelligence concept is difficult to conceive or even trace the possibility of where the AI roots took birth. It has been speculated that in the 1940s specifically in 1942, a short story has been published by an American Science Fiction writer Isaac Asimov.
Two notable engineers Gregory Powell and Mike Donavan developed the plot story is known as Runaround where three laws of Robotics were developed- (1) human beings may not be injured by a robot through inaction or allow a human being to harm; (2) The orders by human beings must be obeyed for robots and the exception case is only when it contradicts the first law; and (3) the existence of its own need to be protected by a robot as long as the protection law is not conflicting the first or second law.
In the field of robotics, AI, and computer science, the work of Asimov was inspired by the generations of scientists and among others, American cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky is also known for co-founding the MIT AI laboratory.
Another breakthrough in AI can be seen by Alan Turing whose machine was developed based on the code that helped in deciphering the Enigma code by The Bombe for the British government service during the Second World War.
The machine Bombe was 7 by 6 by 2 feet large and had a weight of about a ton which was considered to be the first electro-mechanical computer. The work was published in 1950 by Turin in his seminal article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” as it also wondered the powerful way the Enigma code was broken, seen as a miraculous work by the machine being impossible for any human brain to decipher.
The article describes the way intelligent machines can be used to test intelligence and used as a benchmark so that intelligence can be identified for an artificial system leading the human to interact with another human or a machine and is not able to distinguish the machine from the human, leading the machine to be intelligent.
In 1956, finally, Artificial Intelligence got officially coined by two notable computer scientists from Stanford known as Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy whereas an eight-week-long Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence (DSRPAI) at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire was hosted.
The workshop was the beginning of AI and was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and became to be the founding fathers of AI.
IBM 701 was later designed by the participants such as computer scientist Nathaniel Rochester and became the first commercial scientific computer. A new research area was the goal of DSRPAI where researchers from various fields were reunited aiming to build machines so that human intelligence can be simulated.