The Body, The Mind and The Computer: ALife, AI, Cyborgs etc.

Human being has always been fascinated by the notion of thinking machines. The British scientist Alan Turing is regarded as the father of Artificial Intelligence. It was his idea to test if the human intelligence can be tested in machines in the Turing test. Turing’s idea came from insights that if a machine could be made to operations in a logical sequence then it could be possible to make machines that could be made to do many of the repetitions that human being perform. In 1947 Turing argued that the brain could itself be regarded as a computer. Working on his Automatic Computer Engine, he declared that he was more interested in producing models of the action of the brain than in the practical applications of computers.

Artificial intelligence took concrete shape as a subject in the mid-fifties when a conference on artificial intelligence was held at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire in 1956. It led to the establishment of the AI laboratories at MIT a renounce pundit in this field called Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy along with professor of Stanford University Edward Feigenbaum and Joshua Lederberg. The fascination with artificial intelligence has also led to many popular sci-fi novels and movies. The filed of artificial intelligence is still in a nascent stage and will a lot of resource is being on research and development in this field. Some of the common example of the day to day use of artificial intelligence is in the area of search. For example when searching for a something in a popular search engine say for example Google, suggestions for wrong spellings are shown on the top-left hand corner which is an example of Artificial intelligence.

Links:

library.thinkquest.org

www.imdb.com/title/tt0212720

aima.cs.berkeley.edu/

dir.yahoo.com/Science/computer_science/artificial_intelligence