The author of AI, or artificial intelligence (AI), is widely credited to Alan Turing who, in the early 1950s, developed the monumental “Turing Test,” which enabled machines to interact in a way that was indistinguishable from the way humans can interact. To this day, the Turing Test stands as a major milestone in the development of the field of AI, and Turing’s work in the area is still highly influential.
There are many other developers, researchers, and theorists who have made substantial contributions to the field of AI. In the 1950s, Dartmouth College held a major summer conference devoted to AI; the group of researchers who attended the event came to be known as The Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Group, and their work propelled the field forward. This included John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, two prominent figures in the field of AI.
In addition, during the 1960s and early 1970s, a branch of artificial intelligence was developed called “machine learning,” which enabled machines to learn on their own by using data and statistics. This concept was first developed by Arthur Samuel, an MIT researcher. Samuel’s work was then furthered by researchers such as Frank Rosenblatt, who developed the first “perceptron,” which was an early form of the now ubiquitous neural networks.
In the more recent years, many of the advancements in AI have been due to the efforts of researchers like Peter Norvig and Stuart Russell, authors of the leading AI text, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, which has been used by universities all over the world. Others who have made major contributions to the field of AI include Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio and Andrew Ng.
The development of AI is an ongoing process, and with each new breakthrough, it is becoming evermore intelligent and useful. While Alan Turing’s work kicked off the field of AI, the contributions of so many developers, researchers and theorists have made it the complex and powerful concept that it is today. Without their dedication and ambition, the development of AI would not be possible.
Transformation! 