Artificial Intelligence in Byte-sized Chunks

The Second World War brought devastation and horrific suffering for millions of people. But like all wars, it acted as a catalyst for rapid technological advancement

This is a classic AI heuristic (rule of thumb) that says if you can assign scores to your own moves and the moves of your opponent, and look ahead a few moves, then you should pick the moves that result in the best score for yourself to maximize your chances of winning while minimizing the chances of your opponent winning.

their own ways at surviving in their respective niches.

Biological brains

Grey Walter likened their brains to two sensory neurons: one for light, one for touch.

This AI program worked by using three clever tricks that quickly became fundamental to AI and computer science as a whole. First, similar to dynamic programming, the Logic Theorist relied on the idea that search could be used to find the right proof in a massive landscape of alternatives.

The Logic Theorist was one of the methods demonstrated at the Dartmouth Conference, although it only received a lukewarm reception at the time. It had been conceived the year before by American computer scientist Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, a political scientist who was to later win the Nobel Prize for his theory of bounded rationality (the idea that rational people typically make satisfactory decisions, but those decisions are not always the best possible choices). Programmer ‘Cliff’ Shaw was asked to develop the program.

Cybernetics was the first formal study of intelligence, by considering cybernetic loops – the idea that an animal or a machine exhibits behaviour because its sensors detect something, which affects its controller. The controller performs an action in response that then results in an effect to some external system: its environment. The change is then detected by the sensors, which affect the controller, and so on, in a loop. Cybernetics was the first attempt at understanding intelligence in this way, and those such as Grey Walter who tried to build cybernetic systems were making the first electronic artificial intelligences.

. The club was founded by John Bates, a neurologist who was likely inspired by the recent book written by American mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.

This is the world we now find ourselves living in. It’s a world where truth and fiction may be troublesome to distinguish

This blurring of creative authorship challenges our traditional notions of creativity and authenticity in the digital age.