by Admin | Oct 1, 2021 | Chronicles, News
This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert published an expanded edition of Perceptrons in 1988. The original book was published in 1969. The original book explored the concept of the “perceptron”, but also highlighted its limitations. The revised and expanded edition of the book added a chapter countering criticisms of the book made in the twenty years after its publication. The original Perceptrons were pessimistic in its predictions for AI, and was thought to have been a cause for the first AI winter.
Marvin Minksy was an important pioneer in the field of AI. He penned the research proposal for the Dartmouth Conference, which coined the term “Artificial Intelligence”, and he was a participant in it when it was hosted the next summer. Minsky would also co-founded the MIT AI labs, which went through different names, and the MIT Media Laboratory. In terms of popular culture, he was an adviser to Stanley Kubrick’s acclaimed movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. He won the Turing Award in 1969.
Seymour Papert was a South African-born mathematician and computer scientist. He was mainly associated with MIT for his teaching and research. He was also a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence. Papert was also a co-creator of the Logo programming language, which is used educationally.
The History of AI initiative considers this republication important because it revisited and furthered discourses on AI. The original book was also a cause for the first AI winter, a pivotal event in the history of AI. Furthermore, Marvin Minsky was one of the founders of AI. Thus, HAI sees Perceptrons (republished 1988) as meaningful in the development of Artificial Intelligence.
by Admin | Sep 25, 2021 | Chronicles, News
This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – computer scientist James Robert Slagle developed SAINT in 1961. SAINT stands for Symbolic Automatic INTegrator. It was a heuristic program that could solve symbolic integration problems in freshman calculus. The machine was developed as a part of Slagle’s dissertation at MIT, with Marvin Minsky’s help. SAINT is considered the the first expert system. An expert system is a system that performs at the level of a human expert. SAINT was also one of the first projects that tried to produce a program that can come close to surpassing the Turing test as well.
James Robert Slagle is an American computer scientist. He worked on SAINT for his dissertation at MIT with Marvin Minsky. Slagle would receive his PhD in Mathematics from MIT later on in 1961. He’s a Professor in Computer Science with appointments in universities such as MIT, Johns Hopkins, UC Berkeley, and University of Minnesota.
Marvin Minsky also played a role in this project, as Slagle worked with him for this section of his dissertation. He would go on to be an important pioneer in the field of AI. He penned the research proposal for the Dartmouth Conference, which coined the term “Artificial Intelligence”, and he was a participant in it when it was hosted the next summer. Minsky would also co-founded the MIT AI labs, which went through different names, and the MIT Media Laboratory. In terms of popular culture, he was an adviser to Stanley Kubrick’s acclaimed movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Minsky won the Turing Award in 1969.
The full dissertation can be found here. This project and dissertation is special in regard to AI, due to it being another step in its development, most notably for being the first expert system. Albeit it was only a minor project, the HAI initiative regards it as another pioneering attempt in the History of AI.
by Admin | Sep 17, 2021 | Chronicles, News
This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – computer scientist Judea Pearl published Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems in 1988. The book is, according to the publisher, about “the theoretical foundations and computational methods that underlie plausible reasoning under uncertainty.” The book covers topics such as AI systems, Markov and Baynesian networks, network propagation, and more. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) hailed the book as “[o]ne of the most cited works in the history of computer science” and that it “initiated the modern era in AI and converted many researchers who had previously worked in the logical and neural-network communities.”
1988 falls under the end of the second boom of AI, with the promotion of the Strategic Computing Initiative, Japan’s Fifth Generation, and other counterparts from other countries. The bust that followed it, known as the Second AI winter, lasted from the late 1980s to 1993. This bust was due to the perceptions of governments and investors, who believed that the field was failing, despite the fact that advances were still made.
Judea Pearl is a renowned Israeli-American computer scientist. He is a pioneer into Baynesian networks, probabilistic approaches to AI, and causal inference. He is also known for his other books, Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference (2000) and The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect (2018). Professor Pearl won the Turing Award, one of the highest honours in the field of computer science, in 2011, for his works into AI through probabilistic and causal reasoning. He is a Chancellor’s Professor at UCLA.
Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems (1988) can be accessed through the ACM digital library, which also has other resources on computer science and AI.
Due to the impact that the book has, the History of AI initiative considers it an important marker in AI history. Professor Judea Pearl is one of the most influential computer scientists around the world. He is a Mentor of AI World Society Innovation Network (AIWS.net). Professor Pearl resides on the History of AI Board. He was honored as 2020 World Leader in AI World Society by Michael Dukakis Institute and the Boston Global Forum.
by Admin | Sep 11, 2021 | Chronicles, News
This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was proposed. The proposal was submitted on September 2, 1955, but written on August 31, 1955. It was the collaboration of John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon, who would all go on to become important AI pioneers. John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky came from academic backgrounds (Dartmouth and Harvard respectively). On the other hand, Nathaniel Rochester (IBM) and Claude Shannon (Bell Telephones) were tied to corporations.
This proposal was the first instance of the phrase Artificial Intelligence being used officially. The document names direct some aspects of AI – automatic computer, how can a computer can be programmed to use a language, neuron nets, theory of the size of calculation, self improvements, and randomness and creativity. The research proposal asked for funding from sources such as the Rockefeller Foundation. Their estimated cost was $13,500 (not calculated for inflation)
The document called for a “2 month, 10-man study of Artificial Intelligence” in the summer of 1956 (the year following this document’s publication) at Dartmouth College. During this study, researchers will try to connect computer and information sciences with the brain. Each originator of the document wrote their own research proposal.
This event marks one of the beginnings of AI – the conception of what AI is and AI could be. It is the prelude to the big event of AI, the Dartmouth Conference. Without a seminal source like this, AI would not exist or may have taken a different direction entirely. The program, History of AI, owes a debt to the document.
A PDF of this proposal can be found here.
by Admin | Sep 3, 2021 | Chronicles, News
This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – Marvin Minsky and Dean Edmonds built SNARC, the first artificial neural network, in 1951. SNARC stands for the Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator. It is a neural net machine, which itself is a randomly connected network of 40 Hebbs synapses. The idea to develop the machine was from a letter by Minsky to George Armitage Miller, who then got funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Dean Edmonds volunteered to help, as he was good with electronics.
Marvin Minsky was a graduate student in mathematics at Princeton at the time of this project. He would go on to be an important pioneer in the field of AI. He penned the research proposal for the Dartmouth Conference, which coined the term “Artificial Intelligence”, and he was a participant in it when it was hosted the next summer. Minsky would also co-founded the MIT AI labs, which went through different names, and the MIT Media Laboratory. In terms of popular culture, he was an adviser to Stanley Kubrick’s acclaimed movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. He won the Turing Award in 1969.
Dean Edmonds was a graduate student in physics at Princeton at the time of the project. Although there is not many information about him, he wrote a short piece about his time around academia, which also details his contacts with Minsky and SNARC. George Armitage Miller, who helped get funding for the project from the Air Force, was an American psychologist. He was a pioneer in the field of cognitive psychology and cognitive science.
This project is important to the History of AI as SNARC machine was one of the first experiments in the Artifical Intelligence. Furthermore, Marvin Minsky would become one of the founders of AI. HAI considers this an eventful project in the early development of AI.
