A Brief History of AI

Tutorial 2 of 5

A Brief History of AI

1. Introduction

  • Goal of the tutorial: This tutorial aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the history of Artificial Intelligence (AI), from its inception to its current state.

  • Learning outcomes: By the end of this tutorial, you will understand the key milestones in the development of AI, the significance of each phase, and the major controversies and debates in the field.

  • Prerequisites: No specific prerequisites are necessary, but a basic understanding of computer science and programming will be beneficial.

2. Step-by-Step Guide

2.1 The Dawn of AI (1950s - 1970s)

During this period, AI was born and made its first steps:

  1. 1950: Alan Turing proposed the Turing Test as a measure of machine intelligence.
  2. 1956: The term "Artificial Intelligence" was coined at the Dartmouth Conference.
  3. 1961: The first AI program to run in a computer, the General Problem Solver, was developed.

2.2 AI Winter (1970s - 1980s)

This period saw a decline in AI research due to a lack of funding:

  1. 1973: The Lighthill Report criticized AI's inability to fulfill its grandiose promises.
  2. 1980: Japan's Fifth Generation Computer Project failed to achieve its ambitious goals.

2.3 AI Spring (1980s - present)

With the advent of new technologies and algorithms, AI made a comeback:

  1. 1980s: The development of machine learning, with algorithms capable of learning from and making decisions based on data.
  2. 1990s: The rise of the internet increased the availability of data, leading to big data and data mining.
  3. 2000s: The growth of social media platforms further increased the availability of data, leading to the development of deep learning.

3. Code Examples

While this tutorial is mainly theoretical, understanding AI also involves practical programming concepts. Here's a simple Python code snippet demonstrating a basic machine learning algorithm, linear regression:

# Import necessary libraries
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split 
from sklearn.linear_model import LinearRegression
from sklearn import metrics

# Assume X and y are your dataset.
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y, test_size=0.2, random_state=0)

regressor = LinearRegression()  
regressor.fit(X_train, y_train) # Training the algorithm

# To retrieve the intercept:
print(regressor.intercept_)

# For retrieving the slope:
print(regressor.coef_)

This code splits your dataset into a training set and a test set, then it trains the Linear Regression model using the training set and prints the intercept and slope of the model.

4. Summary

This tutorial provided a brief overview of the history of AI, including the early years, the AI winter, and the recent resurgence. For further study, you might want to delve deeper into each of these periods, or explore more about machine learning, deep learning, and their applications.

5. Practice Exercises

  1. Exercise 1: Research and write a short report on the significance of the Turing Test.
  2. Exercise 2: Identify three major AI breakthroughs since 2000 and explain their impacts.
  3. Exercise 3: Modify the provided Python code to implement a different machine learning algorithm (e.g., logistic regression, decision tree).

Remember, the best way to learn is by doing, so keep practicing and exploring different resources!