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| Alan Turing |
In 1950, the English
mathematician and chemist Alan Turing tried to define the conditions so that it
would be possible to affirm that a machine is capable of thinking like us. For
Turing, this will be achieved when the machine is capable of deceiving human
beings, making them think that it is one of them. This test is called the imitation game.
I have talked about this in a previous
post in this blog.
In 1956, Arthur
Samuel of IBM built a program to play the game called draughts or checkers. The
program kept information about the moves in the games it had played, which was
used to modify its future moves (in other words, it learned). In a few years, after playing many games, the
program was able to defeat its creator and played reasonably well in official
championships.
That same year, during
a summer course held in Dartmouth College, John McCarthy and other computer
pioneers coined the term artificial intelligence. Getting their hopes
too high, they predicted spectacular advances for the next ten years, which did
not take place in the time envisaged, but much later. I have also written about
this in another
post.
In 1963, science
fiction writer Fred Saberhagen published the first story of his famous series about
the berserkers,
autonomous and intelligent space fortresses created by an ancient
extraterrestrial civilization to exterminate intelligent life wherever it
appears in the galaxy. This story, titled Without a thought, is an answer to the Turing
Test and a brake to the unbridled hopes of the inventors of the term artificial intelligence. This is
the plot of the story:
