Artificial Intelligence Research
Artificial intelligence
began as an experimental field in the 1950s with such pioneers
as Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, who founded the first
artificial intelligence laboratory at Carnegie-Mellon University,
and McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, who founded the MIT AI Lab
in 1959. They all attended the aforementioned Dartmouth
College summer AI conference in 1956, which was organized
by McCarthy, Minsky, Nathan Rochester of IBM and Claude
Shannon.
Historically, there are two broad styles of AI research
- the "neats" and "scruffies". "Neat", classical or symbolic
AI research, in general, involves symbolic manipulation
of abstract concepts, and is the methodology used in most
expert systems. Parallel to this are the "scruffy", or "connectionist",
approaches, of which neural networks are the best-known
example, which try to "evolve" intelligence through building
systems and then improving them through some automatic process
rather than systematically designing something to complete
the task. Both approaches appeared very early in AI history.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s scruffy approaches were pushed
to the background, but interest was regained in the 1980s
when the limitations of the "neat" approaches of the time
became clearer. However, it has become clear that contemporary
methods using both broad approaches have severe limitations.
Artificial intelligence research was very heavily funded
in the 1980s by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
in the United States and by the Fifth Generation Project
in Japan. The failure of the work funded at the time to
produce immediate results, despite the grandiose promises
of some AI practitioners, led to correspondingly large cutbacks
in funding by government agencies in the late 1980s, leading
to a general downturn in activity in the field known as
AI winter. Over the following decade, many AI researchers
moved into related areas with more modest goals such as
machine learning, robotics,
and computer vision, though research in pure AI continued
at reduced levels.
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