Artificial intelligence (AI), the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to

perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. The term is frequently applied to the
project of developing systems endowed with the intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such
as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience. Since the
development of the digital computer in the 1940s, it has been demonstrated that computers can be
programmed to carry out very complex tasks—
such as discovering proofs for mathematical
theorems or playing chess—with great
proficiency. Still, despite continuing advances
in computer processing speed and memory
capacity, there are as yet no programs that can
match full human flexibility over wider
domains or in tasks requiring much everyday
knowledge. On the other hand, some programs
have attained the performance levels of human
experts and professionals in performing certain specific tasks, so that artificial intelligence in this
limited sense is found in applications as diverse as medical diagnosis, computer search engines, voice
or handwriting recognition, and chatbots.

What is intelligence?
All but the simplest human behaviour is ascribed to intelligence, while even the most
complicated insect behaviour is usually not taken as an indication of intelligence.
What is the difference? Consider the behaviour of the digger wasp, Sphex
ichneumoneus. When the female wasp returns to her burrow with food, she first
deposits it on the threshold, checks for intruders inside her burrow, and only then, if
the coast is clear, carries her food inside. The real nature of the wasp’s instinctual
behaviour is revealed if the food is moved a few inches away from the entrance to her
burrow while she is inside: on emerging, she will repeat the whole procedure as often
as the food is displaced. Intelligence—conspicuously absent in the case of Sphex—
must include the ability to adapt to new circumstances.

Psychologists generally characterize human intelligence not by just one trait but by the combination of many
diverse abilities. Research in AI has focused chiefly on the following components of intelligence: learning,
reasoning, problem solving, perception, and using language.

Learning
There are a number of different forms of learning as applied to artificial intelligence. The simplest is learning by
trial and error. For example, a
simple computer program for solving
mate-in-one chess problems might try
moves at random until mate is found. The
program might then store the solution
with the position so that the next time the
computer encountered the same position it
would recall the solution. This simple
memorizing of individual items and
procedures—known as rote learning—is
relatively easy to implement on a
computer. More challenging is the problem of implementing what is called generalization. Generalization
involves applying past experience to analogous new situations. For example, a program that learns the past tense
of regular English verbs by rote will not be able to produce the past tense of a word such as jump unless it
previously had been presented with jumped, whereas a program that is able to generalize can learn the “add ed”
rule and so form the past tense of jump based on experience with similar verbs.
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Reasoning
To reason is to draw inferences appropriate to the situation. Inferences are classified as
either deductive or inductive. An example of the former is, “Fred must be in either the museum or the café. He is
not in the café; therefore he is in the museum,” and of the latter, “Previous accidents of this sort were caused by
instrument failure; therefore this accident was caused by instrument failure.” The most significant difference
between these forms of reasoning is that in the deductive case the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of
the conclusion, whereas in the inductive case the truth of the premise lends support to the conclusion without
giving absolute assurance. Inductive reasoning is common in science, where data are collected and tentative
models are developed to describe and predict future behaviour—until the appearance of anomalous data forces
the model to be revised. Deductive reasoning is common in mathematics and logic, where elaborate structures of
irrefutable theorems are built up from a small set of basic axioms and rules.

There has been considerable success in programming computers to draw inferences. However, true reasoning
involves more than just drawing inferences: it involves drawing inferences relevant to the solution of the
particular task or situation. This is one of the hardest problems confronting AI.

Problem solving
Problem solving, particularly in artificial intelligence, may be characterized as a systematic search through a
range of possible actions in order to reach some predefined goal or solution. Problem-solving methods divide into
special purpose and general purpose. A special-purpose method is tailor-made for a particular problem and often
exploits very specific features of the situation in which the problem is embedded. In contrast, a general-purpose
method is applicable to a wide variety of problems. One general-purpose technique used in AI is means-end
analysis—a step-by-step, or incremental, reduction of the difference between the current state and the final goal.
The program selects actions from a list of means—in the case of a simple robot this might consist of PICKUP,
PUTDOWN, MOVEFORWARD, MOVEBACK, MOVELEFT, and MOVERIGHT—until the goal is reached.

Many diverse problems have been solved by artificial intelligence programs. Some examples are finding the
winning move (or sequence of moves) in a board game, devising mathematical proofs, and manipulating “virtual
objects” in a computer-generated world.

Perception
In perception the environment is scanned by means of various sensory organs, real or artificial, and the scene is
decomposed into separate objects in various spatial relationships. Analysis is complicated by the fact that an
object may appear different depending on the angle from which it is viewed, the direction and intensity of
illumination in the scene, and how much the object contrasts with the surrounding field.

One of the earliest systems to integrate perception and action was FREDDY, a stationary robot with a moving
television eye and a pincer hand, constructed at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, during the period 1966–
73 under the direction of Donald Michie. FREDDY was able to recognize a variety of objects and could be
instructed to assemble simple artifacts, such as a toy car, from a random heap of components. At present,
artificial perception is sufficiently advanced to enable optical sensors to identify individuals
and autonomous vehicles to drive at moderate speeds on the open road.

Language
A language is a system of signs having meaning by convention. In this sense, language need not be confined to the
spoken word. Traffic signs, for example, form a mini-language, it being a matter of convention that ⚠ means
“hazard ahead” in some countries. It is distinctive of languages that linguistic units possess meaning by
convention, and linguistic meaning is very different from what is called natural meaning, exemplified in
statements such as “Those clouds mean rain” and “The fall in pressure means the valve is malfunctioning.”

An important characteristic of full-fledged human languages—in contrast to birdcalls and traffic signs—is their
productivity. A productive language can formulate an unlimited variety of sentences.

Large language models like ChatGPT can respond fluently in a human language to questions and statements.
Although such models do not actually understand language as humans do but merely select words that are more
probable than others, they have reached the point where their command of a language is indistinguishable from
that of a normal human. What, then, is involved in genuine understanding, if even a computer that uses language
like a native human speaker is not acknowledged to understand? There is no universally agreed upon answer to
this difficult question.
Methods and goals in AI
Symbolic vs. connectionist approaches
AI research follows two distinct, and to some extent competing, methods, the symbolic (or “top-down”) approach,
and the connectionist (or “bottom-up”) approach. The top-down approach seeks to replicate intelligence by
analyzing cognition independent of the biological structure of the brain, in terms of the processing of symbols—
whence the symbolic label. The bottom-up approach, on the other hand, involves creating artificial neural
networks in imitation of the brain’s structure—whence the connectionist label.

To illustrate the difference between these approaches, consider the task of building a system, equipped with
an optical scanner, that recognizes the letters of the alphabet. A bottom-up approach typically involves training
an artificial neural network by presenting letters to it one by one, gradually improving performance by “tuning”
the network. (Tuning adjusts the responsiveness of different neural pathways to different stimuli.) In contrast, a
top-down approach typically involves writing a computer program that compares each letter with geometric
descriptions. Simply put, neural activities are the basis of the bottom-up approach, while symbolic descriptions
are the basis of the top-down approach.

In The Fundamentals of Learning (1932), Edward Thorndike, a psychologist at Columbia University, New York
City, first suggested that human learning consists of some unknown property of connections between neurons in
the brain. In The Organization of Behavior (1949), Donald Hebb, a psychologist at McGill University, Montreal,
Canada, suggested that learning specifically involves strengthening certain patterns of neural activity by
increasing the probability (weight) of induced neuron firing between the associated connections. The notion of
weighted connections is described in a later section, Connectionism.

In 1957 two vigorous advocates of symbolic AI—Allen Newell, a researcher at the RAND Corporation, Santa
Monica, California, and Herbert Simon, a psychologist and computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University,
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—summed up the top-down approach in what they called the physical symbol system
hypothesis. This hypothesis states that processing structures of symbols is sufficient, in principle, to produce
artificial intelligence in a digital computer and that, moreover, human intelligence is the result of the same type of
symbolic manipulation

uring the 1950s and ’60s the top-down and bottom-up approaches were pursued simultaneously, and both
achieved noteworthy, if limited, results. During the 1970s, however, bottom-up AI was neglected, and it was not
until the 1980s that this approach again became prominent. Nowadays both approaches are followed, and both
are acknowledged as facing difficulties. Symbolic techniques work in simplified realms but typically break down
when confronted with the real world; meanwhile, bottom-up researchers have been unable to replicate the
nervous systems of even the simplest living things. Caenorhabditis elegans, a much-studied worm, has
approximately 300 neurons whose pattern of interconnections is perfectly known. Yet connectionist models have
failed to mimic even this worm. Evidently, the neurons of connectionist theory are gross oversimplifications of
the real thing.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI), applied AI, and

cognitive simulation
Employing the methods outlined above, AI research attempts to reach one of three goals: artificial general
intelligence (AGI), applied AI, or cognitive simulation. AGI (also called strong AI) aims to build machines that
think. The ultimate ambition of AGI is to produce a machine whose overall intellectual ability is indistinguishable
from that of a human being. As is described in the section Early milestones in AI, this goal generated great
interest in the 1950s and ’60s, but such optimism has given way to an appreciation of the extreme difficulties
involved. To date, progress has been meagre. Some critics doubt whether research will produce even a system
with the overall intellectual ability of an ant in the foreseeable future. Indeed, some researchers working in AI’s
other two branches view AGI as not worth pursuing.

Applied AI, also known as advanced information processing, aims to produce commercially viable “smart”
systems—for example, “expert” medical diagnosis systems and stock-trading systems. Applied AI has enjoyed
considerable success, as described in the section Expert systems.
In cognitive simulation, computers are used to test theories about how the human mind works—for example,
theories about how people recognize faces or recall memories. Cognitive simulation is already a powerful tool in
both neuroscience and cognitive psychology.
Alan Turing and the beginning of AI
Theoretical work

Alan Turing

Alan Turing, c. 1930s.

The earliest substantial work in the field of artificial intelligence was done in the mid-20th century by the British
logician and computer pioneer Alan Mathison Turing. In 1935 Turing described an abstract
computing machine consisting of a limitless memory and a scanner that moves back and forth through
the memory, symbol by symbol, reading what it finds and writing further symbols. The actions of the scanner are
dictated by a program of instructions that also is stored in the memory in the form of symbols. This is
Turing’s stored-program concept, and implicit in it is the possibility of the machine operating on, and so
modifying or improving, its own program. Turing’s conception is now known simply as the universal Turing
machine. All modern computers are in essence universal Turing machines.

During World War II, Turing was a leading cryptanalyst at the Government Code and Cypher School in Bletchley
Park, Buckinghamshire, England. Turing could not turn to the project of building a stored-program electronic
computing machine until the cessation of hostilities in Europe in 1945. Nevertheless, during the war he gave
considerable thought to the issue of machine intelligence. One of Turing’s colleagues at Bletchley Park, Donald
Michie (who later founded the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception at the University of
Edinburgh), later recalled that Turing often discussed how computers could learn from experience as well as solve
new problems through the use of guiding principles—a process now known as heuristic problem solving.

Turing gave quite possibly the earliest public lecture (London, 1947) to mention computer intelligence, saying,
“What we want is a machine that can learn from experience,” and that the “possibility of letting the machine alter
its own instructions provides the mechanism for this.” In 1948 he introduced many of the central concepts of AI
in a report entitled “Intelligent Machinery.” However, Turing did not publish this paper, and many of his ideas
were later reinvented by others. For instance, one of Turing’s original ideas was to train a network of
artificial neurons to perform specific tasks, an approach described in the section Connectionism.
Chess
At Bletchley Park, Turing illustrated his ideas on machine intelligence by reference to chess—a useful source of
challenging and clearly defined problems against which proposed methods for problem solving could be tested. In
principle, a chess-playing computer could play by searching exhaustively through all the available moves, but in
practice this is impossible because it would involve examining an astronomically large number of
moves. Heuristics are necessary to guide a narrower, more discriminative search. Although Turing experimented
with designing chess programs, he had to content himself with theory in the absence of a computer to run his
chess program. The first true AI programs had to await the arrival of stored-program electronic digital
computers.

Garry Kasparov playing against Deep Blue

World chess champion Garry Kasparov (left) taking a pawn in the opening minutes of a six-game, six-day chess match against IBM's Deep
Blue computer in Philadelphia, February 10, 1996. Feng-hsiung Hsu (right), the principal designer of Deep Blue, keys a move into the
computer. The computer, capable of computing 200 million positions per second, was powerful enough to be comparable to Kaspar ov in its
level of play.(more)

In 1945 Turing predicted that computers would one day play very good chess, and just over 50 years later, in
1997, Deep Blue, a chess computer built by IBM (International Business Machines Corporation), beat the
reigning world champion, Garry Kasparov, in a six-game match. While Turing’s prediction came true, his
expectation that chess programming would contribute to the understanding of how human beings think did not.
The huge improvement in computer chess since Turing’s day is attributable to advances in
computer engineering rather than advances in AI: Deep Blue’s 256 parallel processors enabled it to examine 200
million possible moves per second and to look ahead as many as 14 turns of play. Many agree with Noam
Chomsky, a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who opined that a computer beating a
grandmaster at chess is about as interesting as a bulldozer winning an Olympic weightlifting competition.
The Turing test
In 1950 Turing sidestepped the traditional debate concerning the definition of intelligence, introducing a
practical test for computer intelligence that is now known simply as the Turing test. The Turing test involves
three participants: a computer, a human interrogator, and a human foil. The interrogator attempts to determine,
by asking questions of the other two participants, which is the computer. All communication is via keyboard and
display screen. The interrogator may ask questions as penetrating and wide-ranging as he or she likes, and the
computer is permitted to do everything possible to force a wrong identification. (For instance, the computer
might answer “No” in response to “Are you a computer?” and might follow a request to multiply one large number
by another with a long pause and an incorrect answer.) The foil must help the interrogator to make a correct
identification. A number of different people play the roles of interrogator and foil, and, if a sufficient proportion
of the interrogators are unable to distinguish the computer from the human being, then (according to proponents
of Turing’s test) the computer is considered an intelligent, thinking entity.

In 1991 the American philanthropist Hugh Loebner started the annual Loebner Prize competition, promising a
$100,000 payout to the first computer to pass the Turing test and awarding $2,000 each year to the best effort.
However, no AI program has come close to passing an undiluted Turing test. In late 2022 the advent of the large
language model ChatGPT reignited conversation about the likelihood that the components of the Turing test had
been met. Buzzfeed data scientist Max Woolf said that ChatGPT had passed the Turing test in December 2022,
but some experts claim that ChatGPT did not pass a true Turing test, because, in ordinary usage, ChatGPT often
states that it is a language model.
Early milestones in AI

The first AI programs

The earliest successful AI program was written in 1951 by Christopher Strachey, later director of the
Programming Research Group at the University of Oxford. Strachey’s checkers (draughts) program ran on
the Ferranti Mark I computer at the University of Manchester, England. By the summer of 1952 this program
could play a complete game of checkers at a reasonable speed.

Information about the earliest successful demonstration of machine learning was published in 1952. Shopper,
written by Anthony Oettinger at the University of Cambridge, ran on the EDSAC computer. Shopper’s simulated
world was a mall of eight shops. When instructed to purchase an item, Shopper would search for it, visiting shops
at random until the item was found. While searching, Shopper would memorize a few of the items stocked in each
shop visited (just as a human shopper might). The next time Shopper was sent out for the same item, or for some
other item that it had already located, it would go to the right shop straight away. This simple form of learning, as
is pointed out in the introductory section What is intelligence?, is called rote learning.

The first AI program to run in the United States also was a checkers program, written in 1952 by Arthur Samuel
for the prototype of the IBM 701. Samuel took over the essentials of Strachey’s checkers program and over a
period of years considerably extended it. In 1955 he added features that enabled the program to learn from
experience. Samuel included mechanisms for both rote learning and generalization, enhancements that
eventually led to his program’s winning one game against a former Connecticut checkers champion in 1962.
Evolutionary computing
Samuel’s checkers program was also notable for being one of the first efforts at evolutionary computing. (His
program “evolved” by pitting a modified copy against the current best version of his program, with the winner
becoming the new standard.) Evolutionary computing typically involves the use of some automatic method of
generating and evaluating successive “generations” of a program, until a highly proficient solution evolves.

A leading proponent of evolutionary computing, John Holland, also wrote test software for the prototype of the
IBM 701 computer. In particular, he helped design a neural-network “virtual” rat that could be trained to navigate
through a maze. This work convinced Holland of the efficacy of the bottom-up approach. While continuing to
consult for IBM, Holland moved to the University of Michigan in 1952 to pursue a doctorate in mathematics. He
soon switched, however, to a new interdisciplinary program in computers and information processing (later
known as communications science) created by Arthur Burks, one of the builders of ENIAC and its successor
EDVAC. In his 1959 dissertation, for most likely the world’s first computer science Ph.D., Holland proposed a new
type of computer—a multiprocessor computer—that would assign each artificial neuron in a network to a separate
processor. (In 1985 Daniel Hillis solved the engineering difficulties to build the first such computer, the 65,536-
processor Thinking Machines Corporation supercomputer.)

Holland joined the faculty at Michigan after graduation and over the next four decades directed much of the
research into methods of automating evolutionary computing, a process now known by the term genetic
algorithms. Systems implemented in Holland’s laboratory included a chess program, models of single-
cell biological organisms, and a classifier system for controlling a simulated gas-pipeline network.
Genetic algorithms are no longer restricted to “academic” demonstrations, however; in one important practical
application, a genetic algorithm cooperates with a witness to a crime in order to generate a portrait of the
criminal.

Logical reasoning and problem solving

The ability to reason logically is an important aspect of intelligence and has always been a major focus of AI
research. An important landmark in this area was a theorem-proving program written in 1955–56 by Allen
Newell and J. Clifford Shaw of the RAND Corporation and Herbert Simon of the Carnegie Mellon University.
The Logic Theorist, as the program became known, was designed to prove theorems from Principia
Mathematica (1910–13), a three-volume work by the British philosopher-mathematicians Alfred North
Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. In one instance, a proof devised by the program was more elegant than the
proof given in the books.

Newell, Simon, and Shaw went on to write a more powerful program, the General Problem Solver, or GPS. The
first version of GPS ran in 1957, and work continued on the project for about a decade. GPS could solve an
impressive variety of puzzles using a trial and error approach. However, one criticism of GPS, and similar
programs that lack any learning capability, is that the program’s intelligence is entirely secondhand, coming from
whatever information the programmer explicitly includes.

English dialogue
Two of the best-known early AI programs, Eliza and Parry, gave an eerie semblance of intelligent conversation.
(Details of both were first published in 1966.) Eliza, written by Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT’s AI Laboratory,
simulated a human therapist. Parry, written by Stanford University psychiatrist Kenneth Colby, simulated a
human paranoiac. Psychiatrists who were asked to decide whether they were communicating with Parry or a
human paranoiac were often unable to tell. Nevertheless, neither Parry nor Eliza could reasonably be described as
intelligent. Parry’s contributions to the conversation were canned—constructed in advance by the programmer
and stored away in the computer’s memory. Eliza too relied on canned sentences and simple programming tricks.

AI programming languages
In the course of their work on the Logic Theorist and GPS, Newell, Simon, and Shaw developed their Information
Processing Language (IPL), a computer language tailored for AI programming. At the heart of IPL was a highly
flexible data structure that they called a list. A list is simply an ordered sequence of items of data. Some or all of
the items in a list may themselves be lists. This scheme leads to richly branching structures.

In 1960 John McCarthy combined elements of IPL with the lambda calculus (a formal mathematical-logical
system) to produce the programming language LISP (List Processor), which for decades was the principal
language for AI work in the United States, before it was supplanted in the 21st century by such languages as
Python, Java, and C++. (The lambda calculus itself was invented in 1936 by the Princeton logician Alonzo
Church while he was investigating the abstract Entscheidungsproblem, or “decision problem,”
for predicate logic—the same problem that Turing had been attacking when he invented the universal Turing
machine.)

The logic programming language PROLOG (Programmation en Logique) was conceived by Alain Colmerauer at
the University of Aix-Marseille, France, where the language was first implemented in 1973. PROLOG was further
developed by the logician Robert Kowalski, a member of the AI group at the University of Edinburgh. This
language makes use of a powerful theorem-proving technique known as resolution, invented in 1963 at the
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois by the British logician Alan Robinson.
PROLOG can determine whether or not a given statement follows logically from other given statements. For
example, given the statements “All logicians are rational” and “Robinson is a logician,” a PROLOG program
responds in the affirmative to the query “Robinson is rational?” PROLOG was widely used for AI work, especially
in Europe and Japan.
Microworld programs
To cope with the bewildering complexity of the real world, scientists often ignore less relevant details; for
instance, physicists often ignore friction and elasticity in their models. In 1970 Marvin Minsky and Seymour
Papert of the MIT AI Laboratory proposed that, likewise, AI research should focus on developing programs
capable of intelligent behaviour in simpler artificial environments known as microworlds. Much research has
focused on the so-called blocks world, which consists of coloured blocks of various shapes and sizes arrayed on a
flat surface.

An early success of the microworld approach was SHRDLU, written by Terry Winograd of MIT. (Details of the
program were published in 1972.) SHRDLU controlled a robot arm that operated above a flat surface strewn with
play blocks. Both the arm and the blocks were virtual. SHRDLU would respond to commands typed in natural
English, such as “Will you please stack up both of the red blocks and either a green cube or a pyramid.” The
program could also answer questions about its own actions. Although SHRDLU was initially hailed as a major
breakthrough, Winograd soon announced that the program was, in fact, a dead end. The techniques pioneered in
the program proved unsuitable for application in wider, more interesting worlds. Moreover, the appearance that
SHRDLU gave of understanding the blocks microworld, and English statements concerning it, was in fact
an illusion. SHRDLU had no idea what a green block was.

Shakey

Shakey, a mobile robot, was developed (1966–72) at the Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California. The robot is equipped with a
television camera, a range finder, and collision sensors that enable a minicomputer to control its actions remotely. Shakey can perform a few
basic actions, such as go forward, turn, and push, albeit at a very slow pace. Contrasting colours, particularly the dark baseboard on each
wall, help the robot to distinguish separate surfaces.(more)

Another product of the microworld approach was Shakey, a mobile robot developed at the Stanford Research
Institute by Bertram Raphael, Nils Nilsson, and others during the period 1968–72. The robot occupied a specially
built microworld consisting of walls, doorways, and a few simply shaped wooden blocks. Each wall had a carefully
painted baseboard to enable the robot to “see” where the wall met the floor (a simplification of reality that is
typical of the microworld approach). Shakey had about a dozen basic abilities, such as TURN, PUSH, and CLIMB-
RAMP. Critics pointed out the highly simplified nature of Shakey’s environment and emphasized that, despite
these simplifications, Shakey operated excruciatingly slowly; a series of actions that a human could plan out and
execute in minutes took Shakey days.

The greatest success of the microworld approach is a type of program known as an expert system, described in the
next section.
Expert systems
Expert systems occupy a type of microworld—for example, a model of a ship’s hold and its cargo—that is self-
contained and relatively uncomplicated. For such AI systems every effort is made to incorporate all the
information about some narrow field that an expert (or group of experts) would know, so that a good expert
system can often outperform any single human expert. There are many commercial expert systems, including
programs for medical diagnosis, chemical analysis, credit authorization, financial management, corporate
planning, financial document routing, oil and mineral prospecting, genetic engineering, automobile design and
manufacture, camera lens design, computer installation design, airline scheduling, cargo placement, and
automatic help services for home computer owners.

Knowledge and inference

The basic components of an expert system are a knowledge base, or KB, and an inference engine. The information
to be stored in the KB is obtained by interviewing people who are expert in the area in question. The interviewer,
or knowledge engineer, organizes the information elicited from the experts into a collection of rules, typically of
an “if-then” structure. Rules of this type are called production rules. The inference engine enables the expert
system to draw deductions from the rules in the KB. For example, if the KB contains the production rules “if x,
then y” and “if y, then z,” the inference engine is able to deduce “if x, then z.” The expert system might then query
its user, “Is x true in the situation that we are considering?” If the answer is affirmative, the system will proceed to
infer z.

Some expert systems use fuzzy logic. In standard logic there are only two truth values, true and false. This
absolute precision makes vague attributes or situations difficult to characterize. (When, precisely, does a thinning
head of hair become a bald head?) Often the rules that human experts use contain vague expressions, and so it is
useful for an expert system’s inference engine to employ fuzzy logic.

DENDRAL
In 1965 the AI researcher Edward Feigenbaum and the geneticist Joshua Lederberg, both of Stanford University,
began work on Heuristic DENDRAL (later shortened to DENDRAL), a chemical-analysis expert system. The
substance to be analyzed might, for example, be a complicated compound of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen.
Starting from spectrographic data obtained from the substance, DENDRAL would hypothesize the
substance’s molecular structure. DENDRAL’s performance rivaled that of chemists expert at this task, and the
program was used in industry and in academia.

MYCIN
Work on MYCIN, an expert system for treating blood infections, began at Stanford University in 1972. MYCIN
would attempt to diagnose patients based on reported symptoms and medical test results. The program could
request further information concerning the patient, as well as suggest additional laboratory tests, to arrive at a
probable diagnosis, after which it would recommend a course of treatment. If requested, MYCIN would explain
the reasoning that led to its diagnosis and recommendation. Using about 500 production rules, MYCIN operated
at roughly the same level of competence as human specialists in blood infections and rather better than general
practitioners.

Nevertheless, expert systems have no common sense or understanding of the limits of their expertise. For
instance, if MYCIN were told that a patient who had received a gunshot wound was bleeding to death, the
program would attempt to diagnose a bacterial cause for the patient’s symptoms. Expert systems can also act on
absurd clerical errors, such as prescribing an obviously incorrect dosage of a drug for a patient whose weight and
age data were accidentally transposed.

The CYC project

CYC is a large experiment in symbolic AI. The project began in 1984 under the auspices of the Microelectronics
and Computer Technology Corporation, a consortium of computer, semiconductor,
and electronics manufacturers. In 1995 Douglas Lenat, the CYC project director, spun off the project as Cycorp,
Inc., based in Austin, Texas. The most ambitious goal of Cycorp was to build a KB containing a significant
percentage of the commonsense knowledge of a human being. Millions of commonsense assertions, or rules, were
coded into CYC. The expectation was that this “critical mass” would allow the system itself to extract further rules
directly from ordinary prose and eventually serve as the foundation for future generations of expert systems.

With only a fraction of its commonsense KB compiled, CYC could draw inferences that would defeat simpler
systems. For example, CYC could infer, “Garcia is wet,” from the statement, “Garcia is finishing a marathon run,”
by employing its rules that running a marathon entails high exertion, that people sweat at high levels of exertion,
and that when something sweats it is wet. Among the outstanding remaining problems are issues in searching
and problem solving—for example, how to search the KB automatically for information that is relevant to a given
problem. AI researchers call the problem of updating, searching, and otherwise manipulating a large structure of
 symbols in realistic amounts of time the frame problem. Some critics of symbolic AI believe that the frame
problem is largely unsolvable and so maintain that the symbolic approach will never yield genuinely intelligent
systems. It is possible that CYC, for example, will succumb to the frame problem long before the system achieves
human levels of knowledge.
Connectionism
Connectionism, or neuronlike computing, developed out of attempts to understand how the human brain works
at the neural level and, in particular, how people learn and remember. In 1943 the neurophysiologist Warren
McCulloch of the University of Illinois and the mathematician Walter Pitts of the University of Chicago published
an influential treatise on neural nets and automatons, according to which each neuron in the brain is a simple
digital processor and the brain as a whole is a form of computing machine. As McCulloch put it subsequently,
“What we thought we were doing (and I think we succeeded fairly well) was treating the brain as a Turing
machine.”

Creating an artificial neural network

It was not until 1954, however, that Belmont Farley and Wesley Clark of MIT succeeded in running the first
artificial neural network—albeit limited by computer memory to no more than 128 neurons. They were able to
train their networks to recognize simple patterns. In addition, they discovered that the random destruction of up
to 10 percent of the neurons in a trained network did not affect the network’s performance—a feature that
is reminiscent of the brain’s ability to tolerate limited damage inflicted by surgery, accident, or disease.

In the artificial neural network section shown in the figure, the weight, or strength, of each input is indicated by the relative size of its
connection. The firing threshold for the output neuron, N, is 4 in this example. Hence, N is quiescent unless a combination of input signals is
received from W, X, Y, and Z that exceeds a weight of 4.(more)

The simple neural network depicted in the figure illustrates the central ideas of connectionism. Four of the
network’s five neurons are for input, and the fifth—to which each of the others is connected—is for output. Each
of the neurons is either firing (1) or not firing (0). Each connection leading to N, the output neuron, has a
“weight.” What is called the total weighted input into N is calculated by adding up the weights of all the
connections leading to N from neurons that are firing. For example, suppose that only two of the input
neurons, X and Y, are firing. Since the weight of the connection from X to N is 1.5 and the weight of the
connection from Y to N is 2, it follows that the total weighted input to N is 3.5. As shown in the figure, N has a
firing threshold of 4. That is to say, if N’s total weighted input equals or exceeds 4, then N fires; otherwise, N does
not fire. So, for example, N does not fire if the only input neurons to fire are X and Y, but N does fire if X, Y,
and Z all fire.

Training the network involves two steps. First, the external agent inputs a pattern and observes the behaviour
of N. Second, the agent adjusts the connection weights in accordance with the rules:

A. If the actual output is 0 and the desired output is 1, increase by a small fixed amount the weight of each connection
leading to N from neurons that are firing (thus making it more likely that N will fire the next time the network is given the
same pattern);
B. If the actual output is 1 and the desired output is 0, decrease by that same small amount the weight of each connection
leading to the output neuron from neurons that are firing (thus making it less likely that the output neuron will fire the
next time the network is given that pattern as input).
The external agent—actually a computer program—goes through this two-step procedure with each pattern in a
training sample, which is then repeated a number of times. During these many repetitions, a pattern of
connection weights is forged that enables the network to respond correctly to each pattern. The striking thing is
that the learning process is entirely mechanical and requires no human intervention or adjustment. The
connection weights are increased or decreased automatically by a constant amount, and exactly the same learning
procedure applies to different tasks.

Perceptrons
In 1957 Frank Rosenblatt of the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, began
investigating artificial neural networks that he called perceptrons. He made major contributions to the field of AI,
both through experimental investigations of the properties of neural networks (using computer simulations) and
through detailed mathematical analysis. Rosenblatt was a charismatic communicator, and there were soon many
research groups in the United States studying perceptrons. Rosenblatt and his followers called their approach
connectionist to emphasize the importance in learning of the creation and modification of connections between
neurons. Modern researchers have adopted this term.

One of Rosenblatt’s contributions was to generalize the training procedure that Farley and Clark had applied to
only two-layer networks so that the procedure could be applied to multilayer networks. Rosenblatt used the
phrase “back-propagating error correction” to describe his method. The method, with substantial improvements
and extensions by numerous scientists, and the term back-propagation are now in everyday use in
connectionism.

Conjugating verbs
In one famous connectionist experiment conducted at the University of California at San Diego (published in
1986), David Rumelhart and James McClelland trained a network of 920 artificial neurons, arranged in two
layers of 460 neurons, to form the past tenses of English verbs. Root forms of verbs—such as come, look,
and sleep—were presented to one layer of neurons, the input layer. A supervisory computer program observed the
difference between the actual response at the layer of output neurons and the desired response—came, say—and
then mechanically adjusted the connections throughout the network in accordance with the procedure described
above to give the network a slight push in the direction of the correct response. About 400 different verbs were
presented one by one to the network, and the connections were adjusted after each presentation. This whole
procedure was repeated about 200 times using the same verbs, after which the network could correctly form the
past tense of many unfamiliar verbs as well as of the original verbs. For example, when presented for the first
time with guard, the network responded guarded; with weep, wept; with cling, clung; and
with drip, dripped (complete with double p). This is a striking example of learning involving generalization.
(Sometimes, though, the peculiarities of English were too much for the network, and it
formed squawked from squat, shipped from shape, and membled from mail.)

Another name for connectionism is parallel distributed processing, which emphasizes two important features.
First, a large number of relatively simple processors—the neurons—operate in parallel. Second, neural networks
store information in a distributed fashion, with each individual connection participating in the storage of many
different items of information. The know-how that enabled the past-tense network to form wept from weep, for
example, was not stored in one specific location in the network but was spread throughout the entire pattern of
connection weights that was forged during training. The human brain also appears to store information in a
distributed fashion, and connectionist research is contributing to attempts to understand how it does so.