Understanding the History of Artificial Intelligence (AI) - TechTea

Artificial Intelligence is gaining importance nowadays. AI chatbot, ChatGPT, is one of the key reasons why it is the flood of success of AI everywhere. The Present (Time) of AI may be fascinating, but the History of Artificial Intelligence was not. We are now going to explore, during the History of the Artificial Intelligence, the evolution as well as the achievements of AI.

History of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

It all started since the late 1930's, 1940's and the early 1950's. Yet, the researchers had already found out that the human brain consisted of internally connected wires like networks, called Neurons, that shared information through electrical impulses or signals. Claude Shannon's Information Theory described digital signals. and it was 1943 when, for the first time, the Artificial Model of Neurons was proposed, also Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts talked about the neural networks (the network between artificial neurons), describing how these networks can perform logical functions.

Alan Turing Test and the Accomplishments in Artificial Intelligence

In 1950, Alan Turing, a young British Mathematician, proved with a test that any form of computation can be described digitally, in his theory of computation, called Computing Machinery and Intelligence. This was called as Turing Test. It was the time when "Artificial Brains can actually be created", everybody thought. During the late 1950's and the early 1960's, two programs, called Game AI and Logic Theorist, were created. Game AI was programmed to play chess, and it was capable to challenge a respectable amateur, while Logic Theorist was the first ever program that solved 38 out of 52 theorems in the Principia Mathematica, also provided alternate methods to solve. It was 1956 when this field of research was first called as the "Artificial Intelligence" or (AI). As it was John McCarthy to choose the term - Artificial Intelligence, John McCarthy was called as the Father of Artificial Intelligence, also invented it.

The First AI Chatbot and the Humanoid Robot

In the year 1957, a new program was launched that was capable enough to the higher secondary students' intelligence and had been successful solving algebra and geometry related word problems. Soon, it was a new accomplishment made with launch of ELIZA, the first ever AI chatbot. People could occasionally find out whom they were chatting with was not a human but an Artificial Intelligence. Since, these achievements were not enough to show the capabilities of AI, Japan, in the year 1972, successfully created a humanoid robot, named WABOT-1, that was capable enough to perform certain basic tasks like walking, talking with its artificial mouth with the person in the Japanese (natural) language, measuring distance between objects, and also relocate objects from one place to other.

The Lack of Fund for AI Research

In the years of late 1970's, it became a shortage of funds for the AI research, when the funds were started providing for the researchers, to let them decide to go behind self-interests, instead of the certain (AI) field itself. The results were, for the next 10 years, it was barely any money provided for the AI research.

Reasons behind the Lack of Fund

Following were the reasons behind why it is the lack of fund for the AI research:

• The expectations of the researchers were too high but did not get any results, as a result, the fund providers' patience broke.
• Lack of storage of the data, and it was not possible to solve the problem until the next decade.
• Reasoning Capabilities
• Limited Computer Power
• Criticism across the campus

The Light of Hope

In the 1980's, AI with John Hopfield and David Rumelhart's got revived. This time, AI came back with the Expert Systems, the technique called as "Deep Learning", as these were the algorithms that provided machines the capability to learn from the experience. Now, they knew details, and have the knowledge of the researchers' experiences. This achievement boosted the funds again in the field of AI, but it was just a light of hope that "it would be a revival of AI again". Nothing happened, instead the research was in shortage of funds again, as the producer of specialized hardware, XCON, had cost effective and not easily upgradable Hardwares. Also, Japan had funded heavily around 400 million dollars towards AI research in the year 1981 till 1991. But this revolution of Japan had also collapsed because of similar reasons i.e. not getting the results and the hopes were too high. The term "AI Winter" was coined by the researchers who faced the decades with the lack of funds.

The Arrival of Good Days 

It was the researchers' passion that still drove them into the AI research even after the lack of funds. Finally, Good Days came when a chess playing computer system "Deep Blue" of IBM defeated the World Champion, and it was streaming all over the internet. It could process twice as many moves (around 2,00,000) as it had in the first match (which it lost). Most of the problems solved itself as the computing powers increased.

Achievements

Some of the achievements of AI are as follows:

• In 2006, Facebook, Twitter and Netflix like companies started using AI.
• Google launched its "Google One".
• IBM's Watson won a quiz show and proved that it can under natural language and can solve tricky problems easily.
• AI chatbot, Eugene Goostman, passed a Turing Test competition.
• Autonomous Vehicles got entered into the market by Google's Waymo, Tesla, and Uber.
• In 2016, Google's Alpha Go defeated the World Champion Go player, Lee Sedol.
• The revolution of voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana came into being.
• Deepfake technology's algorithm could make realistic fake videos.
• Robots got developed to help in the field of manufacturing, healthcare, and logistics.
• In 2020, ChatGPT 3 got launched. It was capable to generate human like texts, also demonstrated significant improvements in the natural language.
• By now, AI is already in the field of healthcare, retail and logistics, also it is today helpful in content creation, recommendation systems, and fraud detection.