The invention of the digital computer has been one of the defining moments of the modern era. It all started off by building a machine that could follow commands to the letter. We have come a long way since then. This article talks about a few other tech developments that can be termed defining moments in human history – artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning.
In 1950, a man called Alan Turing posed the question, ‘Can machines think?’ in his paper titled, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, and the world has never been the same ever since. The general consensus is that this was the first step into the world of artificial intelligence (AI). It was in this paper that Turing posed his now popular Turing Test, also known as the Imitation Game (there’s now a popular movie by that title). The term ‘artificial intelligence’ however, was yet to be coined and widely used.
Time rolled by and the language called C was invented between 1969 and 1973 in Bell Labs. This led to a new kind of revolution. We could now give machines a step-by-step list of instructions, which would faithfully be carried out by them. This was the period during which the Internet was born and nourished. These events led to the programming profession evolving to the state it is in today.
The task of a programmer is to understand a real-world situation, define inputs to a program (along with the program itself) and then write out that program in some programming language. As long as you can write down a list of instructions in the sequence in which tasks need to be performed, a computer can follow those instructions. Sometime later, John McCarthy came onto the scene with the Lisp language and coined the term ‘artificial intelligence’. Lisp was a different kind of programming language altogether. Readers who have the time could read up more about this language.
This story is from the November 2017 edition of Open Source For You.
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This story is from the November 2017 edition of Open Source For You.
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