Artificial intelligence is one of humankind's greatest and oldest ambitions. The quest for non-human intelligence has captivated magicians, astrologers and mystics for as long as such professions have existed, but it took Aristotle to kick things off properly. He was the first to start organising laws of thought and the way they interact with the real world -- the basic concepts behind AI. That was in the third century BC, and 2,300 years later we still haven't cracked the problem.
Part of the trouble is that nobody knows what AI is. In fact, nobody even knows what I is. While consciousness is something we all have and enjoy every second of our waking lives, nobody knows how it all really works. A thought is as difficult to isolate from our mental experiences as a single breath of wind is from the weather.
A new sister discipline to AI, cognitive science, has started up to try and track down the mechanisms of mind: while it can say that linguistics, philosophy, neurochemistry, anthropology and so on are all part of the mix, it can't say how these combine to make up our selves.
All this hasn't stopped research into machines that think. Since the 1950s, when Alan Turing famously predicted that by the year 2000 machines would be able to pass as human in conversation, the field has attracted high hopes, brilliant minds and heartbreaking failure in equal measure. Because 50 years of failure eventually starts to affect funding, even in academia, the AI field has diversified and experts have established themselves in other areas where they can be said to have had some success.
