Origins

Abstract

People have always been fascinated by the prospect of intelligent artefacts. Wolfgang von Kempelen’s chess playing automaton for many years astonished and puzzled 18th century Europe. It was later proved a fraud: it concealed, with the aid of ingenious mechanical contrivances, a human player. In those days the technology did not exist to make an intelligent machine. Even at the beginning of this century, when Karel Capek wrote about his robot — and gave us the term to use — an intelligent machine was still considered to be a pipe-dream. But with the arrival of computers during the second World War, man-made intelligence became, for the first time, plausible. In 1950 Alan Turing published his paper Can a Machine Think? showing by this action that it was a legitimate subject, at least for philosophical speculation. But where his interest was that of a mathematician and logician, computer scientists’ interest was much more practical.