HistoryofArtificialIntelligence-MultiEdu.docVIP

History of Artificial Intelligence Compiled by Dana Nejedlová in October 2003 When we look to the past, we can see that people have always been striving to ease their living by making machines that should perform tasks demanding strength, rapidity, or dull repetition. In the beginning it involved only physical tasks, but later people needed some help with the tasks that so far had to be solved only mentally. You surely know that a typical task like this is computing large numbers. By now it is evident that it is possible to construct machines named computers that can compute large numbers far much faster than most of people can do. But people had more ambitions than compute large numbers. They wanted to construct an artificial man that would behave like a genuine man. And it has shown that this task is extremely difficult. From what I have already said you can deduce that artificial intelligence or AI is connected with computers and the wish of people to construct artificial men or robots. But what this curious wish of people to make beings like them, in other ways than ordinary and easy breeding, originates from? I think that it stems from the curiosity of the people about how they are constructed. What makes them feel the feelings? All this effort of creating other intelligent beings, than biological, needs some theoretical background. This background has been built since antiquity. One necessary thing for this was logic. The field of logic has been initiated by Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) with his method of deductive reasoning characterised by the syllogism. A syllogism is a form of reasoning in which two statements are made and a logical conclusion is drawn from them. For example, Socrates is a man, all men are mortal therefore Socrates is a mortal. In the 17th century materialist philosophy flourished in Europe. French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650) proposed that bodies of animals are nothing more than complex machines. British philosopher Thomas Hobbes