Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a formal field was invented in the mid-1950s, with John McCarthy widely recognized as the person who coined the term "artificial intelligence" in 1955 and organized the 1956 Dartmouth Conference, which is considered the birth of AI as a scientific discipline. However, the groundwork was laid earlier by pioneers like Alan Turing , who in 1950 introduced the concept of a test (the Turing Test) to assess a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from a human's.
Key points in the invention of AI include:
- Alan Turing (1950): Proposed the idea of machines thinking and devised the Turing Test as a way to evaluate machine intelligence.
- John McCarthy (1955-1956): Coined the term "artificial intelligence" and organized the Dartmouth Workshop in 1956, which formally started AI research as an academic field.
- Other early contributors: Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts (1943) developed models of artificial neurons foundational to neural networks; Marvin Minsky built one of the first artificial neural networks in the early 1950s.
McCarthy also developed the programming language Lisp in 1958, which became crucial for AI research. His vision was that machines could simulate every aspect of human intelligence if those features were sufficiently well- described.
Thus, while many contributed foundational ideas, John McCarthy is generally credited with inventing AI as a formal discipline by naming it and organizing its first major research effort.
