In 1955, John McCarthy, a mathematics assistant professor at Dartmouth College, coined the term “Artificial Intelligence” (AI) and initiated the Dartmouth Summer Research program on AI in 1956, considered the field’s founding event. The idea of AI dates back to antiquity, with references to automata in Homer’s works and creations of self-moving human-like machines by Hephaestus. In 1308, Ramon Llull’s philosophical work laid the groundwork for AI, inspiring later thinkers like Leibniz and Hobbes. Alan Turing, renowned for breaking the Enigma code during WWII, explored the mathematical potential of AI in his 1950 paper. He proposed the “Turing Test,” evaluating a machine’s ability to exhibit human-like intelligent behavior. The first true AI was Arthur Samuel’s draughts computer program in 1959, and in 2012, a chatbot named Eugene Goostman passed the Turing Test. With the internet’s vast data and advances in computing power, we are moving closer to a world of sophisticated and potentially sentient AI.
