Genesis

When did people start to think that Artificial Intelligence was something reachable for humanity ? 

It is hard to put a precise date on it but surely artificial intelligence became more than just a dream with the remarkable work of the mathematician Alan Turing, it was in the 30's. He was a genius who theorized a machine that could solve any algorithm : The well known Turing's Machine. This theoretical machine could be considered as a computer with infinite memory.

For those who have seen the movie Imitation Game (Spoiler Alert) the machine he invented to break the Nazi's Enigma code in World War II was one of the first ancestors of our computer. But beyond the building of such a machine, what interests us more is its functionality. The "bombe" was used to find the daily setting of the German's writing machine which encrypted messages. It tried out the possible settings for encrypted messages for which they knew the plaintext and stopped when it had a correspondence between the original encrypted message and the newly ciphered plaintext with a given setting. Indeed this machine behavior was rather simple since it only had to answer the question: does our current ciphered message correspond to the original encrypted message and pass to the next setting if this was not the case. However this was a job that took too long for a human and here a machine was able to surpass a man.

From this starting point Computer Science was born. Several scientists invented algorithms which allowed computers to "think". These algorithms constitute the basis of the Machine learning theory, where a machine after "learning" the correlation between a set of input values and the resulting output  values is able to chose what will most probably be the output for new inputs. Machine learning is currently the most efficient tool humans have to mimic the human brain.

In parallel, the Turing Test was also invented. This test consists in a discussion between a human and a machine observed by an evaluator who does not know which one is which. If the evaluator is not reliably able to tell the machine from the human then the machine passes the test. It can be considered as a measure of the artificial intelligence of a machine. Though this test was limited to a few machines it showed how deep researchers thought artificial intelligence had became something possible.  (see: CAPTCHAs)

In the next articles we will see what intelligent machines have been created and how artificial intelligence could evolve in the years to come.