AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol has attracted wide attention to artificial intelligence (AI). People are wondering what exactly is AI and how does it relate to our life?

1956 Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence (AI) conference

The field of artificial intelligence (AI) officially started in 1956, launched by a small but now-famous summer conference at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire. Ten thinkers attended, including John McCarthy, Claude Shannon, Marvin Minsky, Arthur Samuel, Trenchard Moore, Ray Solomonoff, Oliver Selfridge, Allen Newell, and Herbert Simon. The two-month conference gave scientists their first sense of information technology’s potential to be of profound benefit to human beings.

Ups and downs

Although by the early 1970s AI had entered a stage of rapid development it became apparent that it had major problems which were getting worse.

On the positive side, the emergence of artificial neural networks (ANN), seen as a potential approach to realize AI, offered new hope to the struggling scientists.

How ANNs work?

ANNs are a family of models inspired by biological neural networks (the central nervous systems of animals, in particular the brain) and are used to estimate or approximate generally unknown functions that can depend on a large number of inputs. Artificial neural networks are usually presented as systems of interconnected "neurons" which exchange messages between each other. The connections have numeric weights that can be tuned based on experience, making neural nets adaptive to inputs and capable of learning.