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For instance, in 1958, American political scientist and economist Neo-connectionism and machine learning
Herbert A. Simon – who received the Nobel Prize in Economic Technical improvements led to the development of machine
Sciences in 1978 – had declared that, within ten years, machines learning algorithms, which allowed computers to accumulate
would become world chess champions if they were not barred knowledge and toautomatically reprogramme themselves,
from international competitions. using their own experiences. This led to the development
of industrial applications (fingerprint identification, speech
The dark years recognition, etc.), where techniques from AI, computer science, FEATURE
By the mid-1960s, progress seemed to be slow in coming. A artificial life and other disciplines were combined to produce
10-year-old child beat a computer at a chess game in 1965, and hybrid systems.
a report commissioned by the US Senate in 1966 described the
intrinsic limitations of machine translation. AI got bad press for From AI to human-machine interfaces
about a decade. Starting in the late 1990s, AI was coupled with robotics and
human-machine interfaces to produce intelligent agents that
Semantic AI suggested the presence of feelings and emotions. This gave rise,
The work went on nevertheless, but the research was given among other things, to the calculation of emotions (affective
new direction. It focused on the psychology of memory and computing), which evaluates the reactions of a subject feeling
the mechanisms of understanding – with attempts to simulate emotions and reproduces them on a machine, and especially
these on computers – and on the role of knowledge in to the development of conversational agents (chatbots).
reasoning. This gave rise to techniques for the semantic
representation of knowledge, which developed considerably Renaissance of AI
in the mid-1970s, and also led to the development of expert Since 2010, the power of machines has made it possible to
systems, so called because they use the knowledge of exploit enormous quantities of data (big data) with deep
skilled specialists to reproduce their thought processes. learning techniques, based on the use of formal neural networks.
Expert systems raised enormous hopes in the early 1980s with A range of very successful applications in several areas –
a whole range of applications, including medical diagnosis including speech and image recognition, natural language
comprehension and autonomous cars – are leading to an AI
renaissance.

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), the first programmable electronic digital computer, built
in 1946, during the Second World War. Measuring 30 cubic metres and weighing 30 tons, it was developed by the
University of Pennsylvania in the United States, and used to solve problems in nuclear physics and meteorology.
Public domain/ United States Army photo
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