The Birth of AI, and The 1956 Dartmouth Conference
In the recent months the internet has been awash of the news about AI and most especially OpenAI’s ChatGPT which has taken center stage in almost every conversation about AI. Okay, if by the time of reading this post, you had not heard or read about AI or to be more specific ChatGPT, then surely you have a lot of catch-up to do. This is the kind of stuff that concerns all of us so you thinking this is not your area of interest or that you shouldn’t necessarily be aware of, is a grave mistake. Well, it is trending and all, but the big question is:
How did it all start?
If you are a fan of history (I mean ancient literature), you will agree with me when I say that over the past centuries, humans have always made attempts to create something far much greater than them. You perhaps are familiar with or have heard something about the ancient Greek gods. Pamella McCorduck, a renowned American author, once stated that AI traces its origins from man’s ancient desire to forge gods; to create something bigger, stronger, smarter, and faster than us or something that could do things that we would seemingly never imagine doing ourselves. This desire is what has driven civilization among other things. But have you paused to imagine: What if we finally had such things, call it a god, a creature, a machine, that has so much power that it out-thinks us by a factor of millions, is faster, strong and “wise” in all imaginable (and unimaginable) aspects.
Well, I am a believer in the Christian faith and I know for a fact that it’s only God that holds such power (that is unimaginable) and I also know that the origin of other gods stems from mankind attempting to create their own version of “god” that they could in a way bend toward their line of wishing. But this is a conversation for another day.
Now back to AI, History has it that the first attempt at creating a “modern” computing (processing) system was successful in the 1930s. Later developments saw significant improvements in this area and computers with smaller platforms were built.
In the summer of 1956, some research fellows John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon successfully organized the famous “Dartmouth Conference” at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. At this conference, researchers in the areas of Electrical Engineering, Psychology, Mathematics, and Computer Science converged and came up with the idea of creating the “Thinking Machines”. These would be computers (call them Machines) that would have the power to learn, reason and solve problems like humans. And the resulting study would be called “Artificial Intelligence”
The Dartmouth Conference is now well known as the inaugural and trailblazing event in the history of artificial intelligence. It would later macadamize the way for many groundbreaking discoveries and developments in this field in the years that followed to date.
Perhaps to note is that prior to this conference, a lot of background work has already been done and a clear path had been paved, mainly by these individuals; much of what was discussed and resolved in the 1956 Dartmouth Conference had been written out in proposals and papers the previous year. These marked the successes that were noted by John McCarthy and his team in 1956.
Prior to these developments in 1955/6 a lot of research between 1940–1955 (the period we have come to know as the Golden Age) had already yielded the founding principles that would facilitate the “birthing of AI” as we know it. One of such developments was the mathematical and computer model of the biological neuron developed by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts around 1943 and then there is John Von Neumann and Alan Turing; who, in 1950, formalized the architecture of our contemporary computers and demonstrated that it was a universal machine, capable of executing what is programmed.
Alan Turing is well known for his invention of “the game of imitation”. In reality, Turing and Neumann are not the creators of AI but are regarded as the founding fathers of the technology behind it. John McCarthy and his team are the ones that birthed the term “AI”.
