In 1956, John McCarthy and colleagues, in a seminar that took place at Dartmouth College in Hanover (USA), defined the term Artificial Intelligence, so abused now. On the same year, Arthur Samuel, working at IBM, built the first computer program capable of playing checkers. This program kept information about the games it had played and used it to modify its future plays. In other words, it “learned.” After a certain number of games, the program was able to defeat its creator and play reasonably well in official championships.
At first sight, this seemed to go in the good direction. The creators of the term Artificial Intelligence had predicted that ten years later (that is, around 1966) we would have programs capable of performing perfect translations between any two human languages and playing chess better than the world champion. And this would only be the beginning. We would soon be able to build machines capable of behaving with equal or more intelligence than man. The old dream of building artificial men would have come true.
