Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 16.
John McCarthy circa 1957 (Courtesy of John McCarthy)
and to make proposals for its future development. McCarthy solicited
Claude Shannon as co-organiser of the workshop and together they ap-
proached the Rockefeller Foundation, which initially expressed a certain
amount of scepticism. The foundation made some suggestions, includ-
ing that McCarthy and Shannon widen the range of participants. As a
result Marvin Minsky and Nathan Rochester also became co-organisers
and in August 1955 the four of them submitted a proposal for $13,000 of
funding for the project.
18
McCarthy recalls that the Rockefeller Foun-
dation gave $7,500 in support.
19
The Dartmouth proposal document
represents an important milestone in the history of AI and the following
extract provides an excellent snapshot of the state of AI thinking at that
time.
20
18
The items listed in the published version of the proposal add to $13,000 but the total given in
the proposal was $13,500.
19
John McCarthy, private communication.
20
To put into perspective the magnitude of the problem of creating an artificial intelligence that
matches our own, it is helpful to consider what computing resources might be necessary to achieve
that goal. The prolific inventor and author Ray Kurzweil has estimated the memory capacity of
the human brain to be approximately 10
15
bytes. This assumes a brain size of 100 billion neurons
(i.e., 100,000,000,000), with each neuron connected to 1,000 other neurons and 10 bytes of infor-
mation being stored per neuron. Multiplying these three numbers together gives an estimate for the
total memory capacity of the brain of 10
15
bytes (100,000,000,000
10). Kurzweil fur-
ther estimates the total computational capacity of the human brain to be in the region of 20 billion
million calculations per second (i.e., 2
×
1,000
×
10
16
). This assumes a brain size of 100 billion neurons,
1,000 connections per neuron, and a brain speed of 200 calculations per second per neuron (so
100,000,000,000
×
200). When compared to the typical memory capacities and speeds of
the computers of the early 1950s such numbers are astronomic. The IBM 704, for example, ran at
2,000 operations per second and had a core memory capacity of 12,000 bytes in its earliest version,
rising later to 96,000 bytes.
×
1,000
×
