The artificial neuron
McCulloch and Pitts describe a brain neuron as a simple mathematical switch: it either fires or it does not. Their abstraction is an ancestor of today’s artificial neural networks.
Room 1, 1943–1966
The beginnings
Before powerful computers existed, there was a question. Mathematicians and engineers asked whether thought could be described by rules. If so, perhaps a machine could follow them.
Open the interactive room →Exhibits in this room
Turing’s imitation game
Alan Turing proposes a test: if, during a written conversation, you cannot tell whether you are speaking to a person or a machine, should the machine count as intelligent?
The Dartmouth workshop
A group of researchers meets for a summer in the United States. The phrase “artificial intelligence”, proposed the previous year, becomes the name of a new scientific field.
The perceptron
Frank Rosenblatt builds a machine that learns to recognise simple patterns from examples instead of having every rule written for it.
ELIZA, the first chatbot
Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT builds a program that imitates a psychotherapist. It understands nothing, yet many users feel that it understands them.