AI – But Not As We Know It

Artificial intelligence is undoubtedly the current ‘buzz word’, but what many people believe to be a new phenomenon is actually something that’s been around in some form for several decades.

We take a look at the early ways in which AI has been part of our lives.

Alan Turing
One of the first notions of AI came from the famous computer scientist Alan Turing, who gave a public lecture in 1947 saying “What we want is a machine that can learn from experience” and that the “possibility of letting the machine alter its own instructions provides the mechanism for this.” He followed this with a report in 1948 titled ‘Intelligent Machinery’, which introduced many of the central concepts of AI.

Internet Search Engines
Some people are unsure about AI, yet they are actually using a version of it on internet search engines. If you use a platform like Google, it tries to make sense of what you are searching for and then serves up the best options, based on its own thought process. Only this month Google announced key changes to its search policy, which it believes will improve the usefulness of content and reduce the amount of spam that it delivers to users.

Education
Schools and education establishments have used AI for the past couple of years, most notably for exam grade predictions. This has now developed into software that offers a host of data-prediction services, covering everything from estimating future student populations from birth records through to assessing how class size impacts learning outcomes.

Chess Computers
Developed in the late 1990s, chess computers provided opportunities to play even in the absence of human opponents by using quick methods to build, search and evaluate data that would represent a sequence of moves executed during play.