2018: The year that artificial intelligence came of age

AI’s tortuous history

The field of artificial intelligence (AI) is actually rather old. Ancient Greek, Chinese and Indian philosophers developed principles of formal reasoning several centuries before Christ. In 1651, British philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan that “reason … is nothing but reckoning (that is, adding and subtracting).” In 1843 century Ada Lovelace, widely considered to be the first computer programmer, ventured that machines such as Babbage’s analytical engine “might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”

In 1950 Alan Turing’s landmark paper Computing machinery and intelligence outlined the principles of AI

Continue reading 2018: The year that artificial intelligence came of age