What is artificial intelligence?
I mean I guess really when you ask that you have to know what is intelligence. So intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge or skills according to the dictionary but people like Einstein said that the true sign of intelligence isn't knowing or knowledge but imagination, let's try and translate that to a machine though it's not exactly easy. In 1983 education professor Howard Gardner came up with the theory of multiple intelligence which just makes things even more complicated, There's the linguistic intelligence which is like being word smart there's being number reasoning smart, picture smart, body smart, music smart, self smart, people smart, nature smart, you get the idea there's a lot of different intelligences. It doesn't necessarily matter how we talk about intelligence, Intelligence is sort of like pornography you know when you see it right. We know what things are intelligent what things aren't intelligent you have to tell us that they are. People know elephants are intelligent even if we don't know how that intelligent works. So using that kind of an idea of we kind of all have an idea of what intelligence is.
John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence in 1956 and for some reason chess is like the measure that people use for artificial intelligence. I don't know why it's chess it's a complicated game is always more of a checkers man myself. But the mechanical Turk was a robot chess player could beat real people and it was built in the late 1700s it may have played Ben Franklin might have played with Napoleon. It was a case like a wooden case with a man robot that sat in that case and a chessboard on top of it and the man robot was dressed like a man from turkey so it was called the mechanical Turk. In the 1820s after playing lots and lots of people it was uncovered as a hoax and what happened is inside of this case when they would show off the mechanical Turk they would open it up and they would show all of the mechanics inside of their the things that were running this amazing robot and then they would close it up and they would have somebody sit down and play it in chess. It turned out there was a chess master who would sneak up into that case after he closed it like a little magic trick and the Chessmaster was operating the mechanical Turk playing chess. It was still a human person who was playing chess they're just doing it through a machine so that's how they knew it was a hoax somebody figured out that there was a chess player under there
This though inspired the creation of the first difference engine which is sort of like the single-cell organism of the computer world. The difference engine with something that would decide a math problem like adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. And eventually that tiny computer that came about in the early 1900s eventually Garry Kasparov played chess against deep blue that was in 1996 and he won and then 97 the Machine beat him. I mean that's a really short amount of time if you think of all of human history we went from we could build a machine that couldn't play chess to a machine that could play chess on its own in only 70 years but once computers came about it didn't take that long for us to build one that could be just as good as us at something very specific. The tournament that Garry Kasparov lost to IBM's deep blue is kind of incredible. They would play a series of chess games against each other and the first time in 96 Kasparov was like cool i'm good I'm gonna beat this machine but the second time in 97 the tournament in move 44 of the first game deep blue moved its rook which in the grand scheme of chess game probably isn't that big a deal but because it's Garry Kasparov like one of the best chess players at the time ever he thought that this hyper-intelligent machine was making a specific move and he didn't understand what it was so he was freaking out and he thought this hyper-intelligent deep blue machine is gonna do something crazy and it's knowing more about chess than i am. But in reality it was a bug in the computer and it just did this weird counter-intuitive move. The machine could calculate 200 million moves per second but because this was a bug Kasparov was thrown off thinking that the superior machine was actually doing some kind of counterintuitive ruse and that anxiety may help them lose the tournament which is crazy so even when a machine screws up humans, humans loose .
But from there Artificial intelligence throughout history hasn't just been about playing games, it's also been about accomplishing discrete tasks for example maybe you saw the movie the imitation game. Alan Turing was trying to crack the Enigma machine which was a British coding machine. If you want to know the whole story watch the movie, it's great but it was designed to take in information and then try all of these different possibilities to get the answer which would break the code and then allow them to decode what the Enigma machine was encoding. The movie gets its name from Touring's test which he wrote a mathematical paper on called the imitation game and it works like this, The touring test was a way for that Torian came up with to determine whether or not a computer was thinking on its own so an interrogator sit at a computer terminal and types to a hidden entity on the other end of that terminal. Maybe in another room or wherever and after five minutes, if the entity can convince interrogators thirty percent of the time that the entity is a human they will pass the Turing test the thing is the interrogator doesn't know if they're talking to a computer or a human. So sometimes they actually are talking to human and they can ask them questions like you know say my name is and then just type random characters and if the computer types back hello random characters then you're probably sure it's a computer but it could just be a human messing with you. So you have to ask more questions than that and get kind of an idea of conversation the implication being of course that the computer is listening to you responding and thinking through its answers so then computers can think as a human this was during world war 2.
If you've been on the internet in the last 20 years as someone who's my age, if you've talked to a chatbot before and essentially the touring test can be passed by most chat bots today. The first chat bot or a computer that tries to do intelligent conversation with in 1964 was called Eliza and there is also another one named Perry in the 1970s and then Alice in the 1980s are all acronyms by the way. Alice is the linguistics internet computer entity. Then there's Jabberwocky, Cleverbot, el bot, ultra hell. Cleverbot still around you can talk to him i was talking to him yesterday. Eugene goose man in the 2000s was the most clever one and may have been the first chatbot computer to pass the Turing test is a huge news. So what happened is Eugene goose man which is a weird name but was supposed to be a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy and the interrogators were convinced that this chat bot was a human who is a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy 33% of the time so does not mean that the Turing test was passed. The reason that if some people would argue no is because it wasn't fully capable machine it was playing this weird game of not being a fully-fledged person but rather tricking the interrogator into giving it more slack which I don't know. If the computer had figured that out on its own i would say the Turing test was definitely passed because they programmed it to be like oh I don't know I don't not very good with English that's not necessarily it's not very not very clean pass you know even though it did convince thirty-three percent of the interrogators that it was a human. But in the end is convincing someone over a chat system that you can have a conversation is that really a good way to tell if something is thinking I mean the touring test is just one way to do that and even if it is just a chatbot it is pretty smart to be able to have a real conversation there have been times where I remember being younger and on you know AOL Instant Messenger and it i am popped up and i thought it was a person for a while before I realized it was really just an ad trying to get me to go to some stupid website.
In the end intelligence is really really difficult to measure like i said earlier we know it when we see it we can tell that other humans are intelligent you can tell that animals like dolphins and chimps dogs, cats, Wales we can see the intelligence in them. But really you can't measure it very well is a baby human intelligence it doesn't really seem to do that much when it's no newborn does that mean it's not intelligent yet of course it is it's got the potential for intelligence we can tell but you can't really test for it but it's not really about testing your brain when it comes to AI anyway right. It's about what can that way AI do.
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