On Tuesday, April 7, 2024, a conference on artificial intelligence took place at the Ferrero art and culture center.
The period between 1940 and 1960 was significantly marked by the development of technologies, with World War II acting as an accelerator in this field. Alan Turing was one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence innovation. He is known for the Turing machine, which is the “ancestor of computers.” The Turing machine is today the model for all computer programs. At the end of the war, Alan Turing was the only one able to crack the German encryption machine, Enigma. Turing later invented “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” or the “imitation game,” where a human should determine during a dialogue if they are conversing with a human or a machine. This test highlights the question of the boundary between humans and machines.
The second pioneer is the Hungarian mathematician John Von Neumann. His first innovation was the clear separation between the control unit, which organizes the sequence flow of instructions, and the unit that performs calculations, responsible for executing the instructions. The two researchers thus formalized the architecture of our contemporary computers and demonstrated that this was a universal machine, capable of executing what it was programmed to do.
Herbert Simon, an economist and sociologist, was the first to understand that computers are not just made for calculations. He realized that the brain and the computer have the same functions as information processing systems. He created a system called “Logic Theorist” that proves logical theorems.
Artificial intelligence today
The Dartmouth conference was the first time the term artificial intelligence was used. The conference during the summer of 1956 is considered the founding event of AI as a research field.
The success of artificial intelligence today is largely due to neural networks. Initially, this success is driven by access to massive volumes of data. Nowadays, software includes virtual assistants, image analysis software, search engines, and facial and voice recognition systems.
Recently, new AI technologies are emerging and constantly making headlines. This is the case with AI that allows the generation of images from simple words. With the advent of AI like ChatGPT, copyright and intellectual property issues often arise.
