Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
-1-
Early History—Logic, Games and Speech
Artificial Intelligence is the science of making machines do things that
would require intelligence if done by men.
—Marvin Minsky [1]
The idea of “thinking machines” can be traced back to the ancient
civilisations. Around 2,500 BC the Egyptians built statues con-
taining hidden priests who espoused advice to citizens. A bust
of one of these gods, Re-Harmakis, can be seen in the Cairo Museum.
The secret of its “genius” is an opening at the nape of the neck, just large
enough to hide the priest. The existence of these statues confirms the
belief held by ancient civilisations, in the idea of man-made objects that
can think.
But this topic is not about hoaxes. The early history of genuine Ar-
tificial Intelligence begins almost seven centuries before the term was
coined, placing the science of logic in context as a fundamental tool of
AI and encompassing various early attempts to mechanize the processes
of simple logical thought.
Early Logic Machines
Once the ancient Greeks had invented the science of logic, the idea of
reducing all reasoning to some kind of calculation became a popular fas-
cination amongst scientists and philosophers. Mathematical logic has its
own language and that language has its own rules, just as there are rules
(grammar) in English, French and Spanish. And just as anything we want
to say can be said in the many different natural languages in use around
the world, so any statement can be expressed in the language of logic.
Aristotle observed that the property that best distinguishes man from
the rest of the universe is the faculty of reason. In the technical sense,
reasoning is the science of logical argument. In a reasoned process one
starts with two or more statements and uses the information in those
