A short history of AI

The Dartmouth meeting did not mark the beginning of scientific inquiry into machines which could think like people. Alan Turing, for whom the Turing prize is named, wondered about it; so did John von Neumann, an inspiration to McCarthy. By 1956 there were already a number of approaches to the issue; historians think one of the reasons McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence, later AI, for his project was that it was broad enough to encompass them all, keeping open the question of which might be best. Some researchers favoured systems based on combining facts about the world with axioms like those of geometry and symbolic logic so as to infer appropriate responses; others preferred building systems in which the probability of one thing depended on the constantly updated probabilities of many others.