Monday, January 16, 2006

a very special birthday

a very special birthday

... and I missed it. The December 15th, 2005 marked the 50th anniversary of the first artificial intelligence program. Owing to the rarity of computers back in the mid-50s, it was not until eight months later that the program was successfully run on a computer, the JOHNNIAC belonging to the Rand Corporation.

Although they are both gone now, I owe a debt of gratitude to Herbert A. Simon and Allen Newell for writing the Logic Theorist program. A third of my life has been devoted to expanding on the knowledge in the field they created over the Christmas holidays of 1955. Thanks, guys.

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1 comment:

Junker said...

Fascinating stuff, the humble beginnings of mighty and now easily overlooked computers and software that are so important to us all.

I guess I personally owe a special thanks to those lads who pioneered the AI that I thoroughly enjoy doing battle with on my countless computer games :-)