Origins of Artificial Intelligence
Success Criteria: Identify early ideas, key events, and the origin of the term.
In 1950, Alan Turing posed a fundamental question: “Can machines think?” He devised a test for machine intelligence later known as the Turing Test. In this test, a human judge engages in natural language conversations with both a human and a machine without knowing which is which. If the evaluator cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine passes.
In 1956, researchers at the Dartmouth Workshop initiated a project on machine intelligence, officializing the term “Artificial Intelligence.” This milestone marked AI as a distinct academic discipline rather than just a theoretical question.
During the 1960s and 1970s, AI research focused on rule-based logic and structured human knowledge. Researchers believed that providing enough rules and facts would allow machines to reason like humans. However, relying strictly on symbolic logic made it difficult for systems to grasp context, natural language nuance, perception, or self-correction.