The term artificial intelligence, or AI, was coined at the ground-breaking Dartmouth conference of 1956. But man's interest in the notion that a machine could be given the ability to think can be traced back to the myths and stories of the ancient world.
The Greek myth of Pygmalion, who created a living statue, and the legend of the Golem, a clay statue brought to life by a Jewish Rabbi, bear testimony to man's curious obsession with playing creator.
The philosophers of Ancient Greece also influenced many aspects of modern technology -- the Boolean logic upon which the circuitry of today's computers is based has its origins in the symbolic logic of the Greeks.
In the centuries that have followed, myriad philosophers actively pondered some of the same questions addressed by present-day AI researchers. For example, the great French thinker Descartes -- whose statement, "I think, therefore I am", identified that to be intelligent is to be alive -- believed that animals were no more than automatons, or self-moving machines. But he was foxed by the Queen of France who insisted on seeing proof that a clock could reproduce.
Other medieval attempts at AI included The Turk, an allegedly intelligent chess-playing machine (which turned out to be a small man hidden in a box).
More serious research into artificial intelligence began at the start of the twentieth century, although at its end we are still a long way from creating truly intelligent creatures. To date, researchers have only managed to achieve "Weak AI", as in creating machines with some aspects of human behaviour. "Strong AI" -- making machines think -- is yet to come.
