The previous sections of this chapter help you understand intelligence from the human perspective and see how modern computers are woefully inadequate for simulating such intelligence, much less actually becoming intelligent themselves. However, the desire to create intelligent machines (or, in ancient times, idols) is as old as humans. The desire not to be alone in the universe, to have something with which to communicate without the inconsistencies of other humans, is a strong one. Of course, a single book can’t contemplate all of human history, so the following sections provide a brief, pertinent overview of the history of modern AI attempts.

symbolic logic at Dartmouth

The earliest computers were just that: computing devices. They mimicked the human ability to manipulate symbols in order to perform basic math tasks, such as addition. Logical reasoning later added the capability to perform mathematical reasoning through comparisons (such as determining whether one value is greater than another value). However, humans still needed to define the algorithm used to perform the computation, provide the required data in the right format, and then interpret the result.