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| John McCarthy |
In a famous summer course that took place at
Dartmouth College in 1956, the term artificial
intelligence was applied for the first time to all those
computer programs that perform tasks traditionally considered exclusively
human, such as playing chess and translating from one human language to another.
Those attending the course, led by John McCarthy, felt optimistic enough to
predict that in ten years those two problems would have been completely solved.
Thus, they hoped that by 1966 there would be programs capable of defeating the world
chess champion, and others that would translate perfectly between any two human
languages.
In March 1961, my uncle, Felipe F. Moreno, then
chief of Spanish translators at the headquarters of the International
Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, wrote in the ITU magazine an article
on machine translation and how it could affect human translators, which proves that the question was hot. Shortly
afterwards, when the deadline announced by the artificial intelligence
forerunners had been reached, with both problems far from being solved, it was obvious
that they had been overly optimistic.
We know that the goal of writing a program that
would defeat the world chess champion was met in 1997, when Deep Blue defeated
Garry Kasparov, the champion in that year. The other problem, machine
translation, was even more difficult. At the end of the sixties the following
anecdote was well-known in the computer-programming world:
