Specialized Histories

Histories of Areas Related to Artificial Intelligence

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Specialized Histories

The AAAI

Some Recollections about the Early Days of AAAI by BG Buchanan (2005). "This article provides a historical background on the origins of AAAI, recounting some of the issues discussed and requirements to be fulfilled by the new society. It provides a personal reminiscence of some of the persons who founded the association, including Raj Reddy, Donald Walker, and Woody Bledsoe. ..."

Cognitive Science

Mechanical Mind. Gilbert Harman reviews "Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science," by Margaret A. Boden (Oxford University Press, 2006). American Scientist Online [January / Ferbruary 2008]. "The term cognitive science, which gained currency in the last half of the 20th century, is used to refer to the study of cognition -- cognitive structures and processes in the mind or brain, mostly in people rather than, say, rats or insects. Cognitive science in this sense has reflected a growing rejection of behaviorism in favor of the study of mind and 'human information processing.' The field includes the study of thinking, perception, emotion, creativity, language, consciousness and learning. Sometimes it has involved writing (or at least thinking about) computer programs that attempt to model mental processes or that provide tools such as spreadsheets, theorem provers, mathematical-equation solvers and engines for searching the Web. The programs might involve rules of inference or 'productions,' 'mental models,' connectionist 'neural' networks or other sorts of parallel 'constraint satisfaction' approaches. Cognitive science so understood includes cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and artificial life; conceptual, linguistic and moral development; and learning in humans, other animals and machines. ... Boden's goal, she says, is to show how cognitive scientists have tried to find computational or informational answers to frequently asked questions about the mind -- 'what it is, what it does, how it works, how it evolved, and how it's even possible.' How do our brains generate consciousness? Are animals or newborn babies conscious? Can machines be conscious? If not, why not? How is free will possible, or creativity? How are the brain and mind different? What counts as a language? ... The first five chapters present the historical background of the field, delving into such topics as cybernetics and feedback, and discussing important figures such as René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Charles Babbage, Alan Turing and John von Neumann, as well as Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, who in 1943 cowrote a paper on propositional calculus, Turing machines and neuronal synapses. ... Chapter 6 introduces the founding personalities of cognitive science from the 1950s. ... Herbert Simon and Allen Newell developed a computer program for proving logic theorems.

Connectionism

Connectionism "is a theory of information processing ... [that relies] on parallel processing of sub-symbols, using statistical properties instead of logical rules to transform information. Connectionists base their models upon the known neurophysiology of the brain..." From A Brief History of Connectionism by David Medler (downloadable PDF file at www.web.uvic.ca/~dmedler/files/ncs98.pdf).

Cybernetics

History of Cybernetics. Discusses the coalescence of cybernetics in the 1940's, with links to the pre-history of the field, photos, biographical information about participants. See also, History of Macy Foundation Conferences (1946-1953) sponsored by the Joshiah Macy, Jr. Foundation. An important set of conferences on Cybernetics, Biological Systems, and Social Systems. Includes a chronologically-ordered listing of the Macy Conferences, the attendees involved, and the activities that occurred. Some notable participants were Warren McCulloch, Heinz von Forester, Walter Pitts, Arturo Rosenbluth, W.Ross Ashby, John von Neuman, Claude Shannon. "The bulk of the documentation for the first five conferences can only be found in (e.g.) participants' surviving notes, a few rare copies of McCulloch's reports, and miscellaneous writings from those participants whose papers were archived. The subsequent proceedings for the sixth through the tenth conferences are relatively rare. In other words, the remarkable content of the Macy Conferences is incompletely documented and hard to find."

Decision Making

A Brief History of Decision Making - Humans have perpetually sought new tools and insights to help them make decisions. From entrails to artificial intelligence, what a long, strange trip it's been. By Leigh Buchanan and Andrew O'Connell. Harvard Business Review (January 2006). "Future Nobel laureate Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, Harold Guetzkow, Richard M. Cyert, and James March were among the [Carnegie Institute of Technology] scholars who shared a fascination with organizational behavior and the workings of the human brain. The philosopher's stone that alchemized their ideas was electronic computing. By the mid-1950s, transistors had been around less than a decade, and IBM would not launch its groundbreaking 360 mainframe until 1965. But already scientists were envisioning how the new tools might improve human decision making. The collaborations of these and other Carnegie scientists, together with research by Marvin Minsky at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and John McCarthy of Stanford, produced early computer models of human cognition -- the embryo of artificial intelligence. AI was intended both to help researchers understand how the brain makes decisions and to augment the decision-making process for real people in real organizations."

Logic Programming

Middle History of Logic Programming: Resolution, Planner, Edinburgh Logic for Computable Functions, Prolog and the Japanese Fifth Generation Project. (April, 2009, revised June, 2010). Carl Hewitt. Downloadable PDF. Review of the history and main ideas. "Logic Programming can be broadly defined as 'using logic to infer computational steps from existing propositions' ...The focus of this article is on the development of this idea. ... The idea has a long development that went through many twists in which important questions turned out to have surprising answers including the following:

• Is computation reducible to logic?
• Did Logic Programming contribute to the failure of the Japanese Fifth Generation Project (ICOT)?
• What is Logic Programming?"

Machine Learning

The Discipline and Future of Machine Learning. Video of Tom Mitchell's March 1, 2007 seminar talk at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science's Machine Learning Department: "Over the past 50 years the study of machine learning has grown from the efforts of a handful of computer engineers exploring whether computers could learn to play games, and a field of statistics that largely ignored computational considerations, to a broad discipline that has produced fundamental statistical-computational theories of learning processes, has designed learning algorithms that are routinely used in commercial systems from speech recognition to computer vision, and has spun off an industry in data mining to discover hidden regularities in the growing volume of online data."

Robocup Soccer

A Brief History of RoboCup includes the following: "The idea of robots playing soccer was first mentioned by Professor Alan Mackworth (University of British Columbia, Canada) in a paper entitled 'On Seeing Robots' presented at VI-92, 1992. and later published in a book Computer Vision: System, Theory, and Applications, pages 1-13, World Scientific Press, Singapore, 1993. A series of papers on the Dynamo robot soccer project was published by his group. Independently, a group of Japanese researchers organized a Workshop on Grand Challenges in Artificial Intelligence in October, 1992 in Tokyo, discussing possible grand challenge problems. This workshop led to a serious discussions of using the game of soccer for promoting science and technology."

Robots

History's 10 Most Influential Robots. List compiled by Elizabeth Fish, for PCWorld (April 13, 2012).

Timeline of the History of Robots and some brief biographical sketches of early robotics pioneers.

Timeline: Real robots - "Robots are not new. They have been around for centuries in various forms. Here's a brief overview of the development of both robots and computers." From BBC News.

Timeline of Robots in the Arts. From the 3rd c. BCE to the 21st c.

History of Technology

Several older papers on the relationships of people and machines.

Women in Computer Science

Women in the History of Computer Science - "A panel of pioneers of the 1940s and 1950s discusses their experiences which range from programming the world's first computing machines to developing biomedical and graphical applications for computers. This video provides an opportunity to hear and learn the hidden history of the period and confirm that Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper were not the only female contributors to the rich history of computing!" A video from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing collection provided by ResearchChannel.