Pittsburgh may not be the birthplace of AI, but it served as a cradle.
And the technology is older than you probably think.
Carnegie Mellon University is one of the places where AI was being developed more than 50 years ago.
Tom Mitchell, who has taught at Carnegie Mellon since 1986 and led the university’s Machine Learning Department for the first 10 years of its operation, said AI has been around longer than people realize.
“Most people kind of attribute the start of the field to a meeting that was held back in the 1950s at Dartmouth (College) about AI,” he said. “There were a number of people who came to be known as the … founding fathers of the field.”
Two of them were professors at Carnegie Mellon: Allen Newell and Herbert Simon.
Newell was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology, also working for the RAND Corp. He died in 1992. Simon, a Nobel Prize winner, was well known for his work in computer and economic sciences as well as cognitive psychology. He died in 2001.
Both won awards for their work to develop The General Problem Solver, one of the first AI programs, in 1957. In 1975, the pair won the A.M. Turing Award, named for AI pioneer Alan Turing and widely considered the Nobel Prize of computer science.
In the 1950s, Newell and Simon founded what is believed to be the first hub dedicated to researching AI at Carnegie Mellon. That laid the foundation of the university’s research and its robotics institute. The robotics institute expanded in 1997 and created the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery, which evolved into the current Machine Learning Department.
The others credited with founding AI are a virtual Who’s Who of pioneering computer scientists.
Alan Turing (1912-54): A British logician and a pioneer in computers, he may have been the first person to give a public lecture that mentioned artificial intelligence. In 1947 in London, he said humans could develop “a machine that can learn from experience” and that the “possibility of letting the machine change its own instructions provides the mechanism for this,” according to Quidgest, an online scientific paper clearinghouse and software developer.
Even before that, in 1935, Turing described a machine with infinite memory and a scanner that could troll through the memory, finding what it needs and creating new entries. It was known as the universal Turing machine and became the basis of every modern-day computer. During World War II, Turing worked with the British government to crack German code machines.
In 1948, he published “Intelligent Machinery,” a report that contained many base concepts of artificial intelligence. In the early 1950s, he developed the Turing Test, designed to determine whether a machine was “smart” enough to pass for a human. It wasn’t until 2014 that a chatbot called Eugene Goostman, designed to mimic a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy, managed to convince the minimum 30% of judges that it was human.
John McCarthy (1927-2011): Another Turing Award winner, McCarthy is credited with contributing to some of the most important technologies ever devised, including the internet, robots and programming languages. He invented the List Processing Language (Lisp), one of the basic tools used in the development of AI. In 1959, he invented a tool that allows computer programs to remove bits of programming language not being used from a computer’s Random Access Memory. That tool, combined with Lisp, is the basis of many modern programming languages.
He was the founding director of Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1967.
He also was the principal organizer of the Dartmouth College meeting and is credited with coining the phrase “artificial intelligence.”
Marvin Minsky (1927-2016): A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Minsky is credited with being the first scientist dedicated to giving computer programs human-like characteristics. He developed the Stochastic Neural-Analog Reinforcement Computer, the world’s first electronic learning system and first simulation of the brain’s neural networks. He co-founded MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab and won the Turing Award in 1969.