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formal logic in a symbolic or algebraic way, which can be viewed as the sprout
of the “thinking machine”.
Since the 19th century, advancement of sciences and technologies such as
Mathematical Logic, Automata Theory, Cybernetics, Information Theory,
Computer Science and Psychology laid the ideological, theoretical and material
foundation for the development of AI research. In the topic “An Investigation of
the Laws of Thought”, George Boole (1815-1864) developed the Boolean
algebra, a form of symbolic logic to represent some basic rules for reasoning in
the thinking activities. Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) proved the incompleteness
theorems. Alan Turing (1912-1954) introduced the Turing Machine, a model of
the ideal intelligent computer, and initiated the automata theory. In 1943, Warren
McCulloch (1899-1969) and Walter Pitts (1923-1969) developed the MP neuron,
a pioneer work of Artificial Neural Networks research. In 1946, John Mauchly
(1907-1980). and John Eckert (1919-1995) invented the ENIAC (Electronic
Numerical Integrator And Computer), the first electronic computer. In 1948,
Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) published a popular topic of “Cybernetics”, and
Claude Shannon (1916-2001) proposed the Information Theory.
In a real world, quite a number of problems are complex ones, most of the
times without any algorithm to adopt; or even if there are calculation methods,
they are still NP problems. Researchers might introduce heuristic knowledge to
solve such problem-solving to simplify complex problems and find solutions in
the vast search space. Usually, the introduction of domain-specific empirical
knowledge will produce satisfactory solutions, though they might not be the
mathematically optimal solutions. This kind of problem solving with its own
remarkable characteristics led to the birth of AI. In 1956, the term “Artificial
Intelligence” was coined, and the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on
Artificial Intelligence, proposed by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, etc., was
carried on at Dartmouth College with several American scientists of psychology,
mathematics, computer science and information theory. This well-known
Dartmouth conference marked the beginning of the real sense of AI as a research
field. Through dozens of years of research and development, great progress has
been made in the discipline of AI. Many artificial intelligence expert systems
have been developed and applied successfully. In domains such as Natural
Language Processing, Machine Translation, Pattern Recognition, Robotics and
Image Processing, a lot of achievements have been made, and the applications
span various areas to promote their development.
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