ACCORDING TO Encyclopaedia Britannica, artificial intelligence (AI) is “the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings”.
AI has roots going back decades. The idea of creating “thinking machines” can be traced to philosophers and mathematicians who explored logic and reasoning, but the formal field of AI began in the 1950s. Alan Turing’s work on computation and his famous Turing Test laid the foundation for this, and the 1956 Dartmouth Conference officially marked the birth of AI research. Since then, AI has gone through cycles of progress and setbacks, known as “AI winters”, before resurging with breakthroughs in machine learning and deep learning in the 2000s and 2010s.
