Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- A quick tour through the book
- Acknowledgments
- Prologue: Blog entry from Jonathan Hey
- 1 Beginnings of a revolution
- 2 The hardware
- 3 The software is in the holes
- 4 Programming languages and software engineering
- 5 Algorithmics
- 6 Mr. Turing’s amazing machines
- 7 Moore’s law and the silicon revolution
- 8 Computing gets personal
- 9 Computer games
- 10 Licklider’s Intergalactic Computer Network
- 11 Weaving the World Wide Web
- 12 The dark side of the web
- 13 Artificial intelligence and neural networks
- 14 Machine learning and natural language processing
- 15 The end of Moore’s law
- 16 The third age of computing
- 17 Computers and science fiction – an essay
- Epilogue: From Turing’s padlocked mug to the present day
- Appendix 1 Length scales
- Appendix 2 Computer science research and the information technology industry
- How to read this book
- Notes
- Suggested reading
- Figure credits
- Name index
- General index
13 - Artificial intelligence and neural networks
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- A quick tour through the book
- Acknowledgments
- Prologue: Blog entry from Jonathan Hey
- 1 Beginnings of a revolution
- 2 The hardware
- 3 The software is in the holes
- 4 Programming languages and software engineering
- 5 Algorithmics
- 6 Mr. Turing’s amazing machines
- 7 Moore’s law and the silicon revolution
- 8 Computing gets personal
- 9 Computer games
- 10 Licklider’s Intergalactic Computer Network
- 11 Weaving the World Wide Web
- 12 The dark side of the web
- 13 Artificial intelligence and neural networks
- 14 Machine learning and natural language processing
- 15 The end of Moore’s law
- 16 The third age of computing
- 17 Computers and science fiction – an essay
- Epilogue: From Turing’s padlocked mug to the present day
- Appendix 1 Length scales
- Appendix 2 Computer science research and the information technology industry
- How to read this book
- Notes
- Suggested reading
- Figure credits
- Name index
- General index
Summary
It is not my aim to shock you – if indeed that were possible in an age of nuclear fission and prospective interplanetary travel. But the simplest way I can summarize the situation is to say that there are now in the world machines that think, that learn and that create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until – in a visible future – the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied.
Herbert Simon and Allen NewellCybernetics and the Turing Test
One of the major figures at MIT before World War II was the mathematician Norbert Wiener (B.13.1). In 1918, Wiener had worked at the U.S. Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground, where the army tested weapons. Wiener calculated artillery trajectories by hand, the same problem that led to the construction of the ENIAC nearly thirty years later. After World War II, Wiener used to hold a series of “supper seminars” at MIT, where scientists and engineers from a variety of fields would gather to eat dinner and discuss scientific questions. J. C. R. Licklider usually attended. At some of these seminars, Wiener put forward his vision of the future, arguing that the technologies of the twentieth century could respond to their environment and modify their actions:
The machines of which we are now speaking are not the dream of the sensationalist nor the hope of some future time. They already exist as thermostats, automatic gyrocompass ship-steering systems, self-propelled missiles – especially such as seek their target – anti-aircraft fire-control systems, automatically controlled oil-cracking stills, ultra-rapid computing machines, and the like.…
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- The Computing UniverseA Journey through a Revolution, pp. 263 - 279Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014