Since the dawn of computers, people have wondered if they tan be made to show intelligence—to think in the way that humans think. Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace first debated the question when they worked together to create the first computer in 1835.
By 1950, U.S. mathematician Claude Shannon was busy trying to figure out how computers could play a good game of chess. On the other side of the Atlantic, Alan Turing published his paper "On Computing Machinery and Intelligence," which considered the thorny problem of how you could actually tell if a machine was intelligent or not.
In 1955, John McCarthy, of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, proposed a conference to study the issue of intelligence research. In his proposal, he used the phrase "artificial intelligence" for the first time, and an entire field of study was born The 1956 Dartmouth Conference is now known as the defining moment of artificial intelligence (Al) research. The conference set the path for research for years to come, asking questions that remain unanswered to this day. Many of the great minds who attended, such as Harvard's Marvin Minsky, devoted the rest of their careers to a subject that had only just been given a name.
While there was great optimism at the conference, with many attendees expecting intelligent machines to appear within a decade, artificial intelligence remains elusive. Although there have been notable successes—IBM's Deep Blue computer beating chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, for example—they have been in very narrow fields.
