Team Partners Telecommunications

AI, a Short History!

Posted on Nov 20, 2019

Last month’s blog looked at AI, Artificial Intelligence, and the degree to which we have dealings with it almost every day, often without realising it. To most of us the whole idea of Artificial Intelligence, whilst not being entirely new is something slightly unnerving that’s been around for many years as a thing-we’d-heard-about but hadn’t come across. But not anymore. As we discussed last month, insidiously or otherwise it’s here and it’s playing an ever-growing role in our lives.

So where did it come from? How did it happen? Well, it may surprise you to know that it first happened a very long time ago…as long ago as 1308 in fact, when a chap called Ramon Llull, a poet living in Catalonia, first thought of the idea of writing various concepts / thoughts on pieces of paper and then putting these together in different sequences to create new thoughts and concepts. It took the thick end of another 350 years before Gottfried Leibniz, a German, took Llull’s basic idea and argued that, ultimately, all ideas are no more than a combination of a relatively small number of basic concepts. What Leibniz added to the argument was the idea that it would be possible to produce an alphabet or collection of human thought…not that he went on to do so.

This is where a name we all recognise enters the story. In Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Swift makes fun of Llull. He sends Gulliver to the island of Laputa where he finds an engine. He describes this as being, “A Project for improving speculative Knowledge by practical and mechanical Operations." By using this "Contrivance," "the most ignorant Person at a reasonable Charge, and with a little bodily Labour, may write Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks, and Theology, with the least Assistance from Genius or study." Tongue Swift may have been, but he laid out a pretty accurate idea of where AI was heading in a book that was one of the most popular of its time…and actually, any time. 

At this point things become technical! It’s the Age of Enlightenment and science is the order of the day. In 1763 Thomas Bayes, who was both an outstanding mathematician and a Presbyterian minister, came out with what is known as known as Bayes’ Theorem, a method (to quote Wiki) “of statistical inference in which Bayes' theorem is used to update the probability for a hypothesis as more evidence or information becomes available. Bayesian inference is an important technique in statistics, and especially in mathematical statistics. Bayesian updating is particularly important in the dynamic analysis of a sequence of data. Bayesian inference has found application in a wide range of activities, including science, engineering, philosophy, medicine, sport, and law. In the philosophy of decision theory, Bayesian inference is closely related to subjective probability, often called "Bayesian probability". Now that’s quite a mouthful, but if you read last month’s blog, you’ll understand the relevance of this to Machine Learning and the idea of an artificial intelligence being able to increase its own ability. And this was 1763.

Things hotted up when in 1898 Nikola Tesla (the car was named in his honour) demonstrated the world’s first radio-controlled vessel, a model boat on a small pond. What’s this to do with AI? It’s the fact that Tesla described his boat as having a “borrowed mind”. In fact, he went further, he told a reporter that, “you see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race."

The idea of robots became quite the fashion. R.U.R. was a play produced in 1921, the letters standing for Rossum’s Universal Robots. Star War’s own favourite robot, C-3PO was inspired by the robot double of Maria, a peasant girl in the 1927 film “Metropolis”.

And then came… ”A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity”, a catchy title for a 1943 paper that included the truly prophetic phrase, “mimicking the brain”, but more about this next time!