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Alan Turing: the father of AI

We will start our learning about AI by looking at the history of the field. For many people, Alan Turing is seen as the father of AI. He published his paper Computing machinery and intelligence in the Mind Journal in 1950 which considered the question “Can machines think?”

Turing discusses three distinct strategies which might be considered capable of achieving a thinking machine. These can be characterised as follows:

  1. AI by programming,
  2. AI by ab initio machine learning and
  3. AI using logic, probabilities, learning and background knowledge

Although the technology did not exist to implement these ideas at this stage, these ideas are remarkably close to the technologies which have formed the foundations of artificial intelligence ever since.

Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0

Turing’s Programming approach to Artificial Intelligence was the dominant method for Artificial Intelligence research up until the mid- 1980s. The culmination of this approach was the rule-based expert systems of the 1980s including MYCIN, an early and quite primitive medical application, and XCON which was used as a real-world application to configure minicomputers.

As the limits of rule-based expert systems became apparent in the 1980s, applications based upon ab initio machine learning came to the fore. However, the limitations of ab initio machine learning, that were foreseen by Turing, meant that the approach to machine learning had to evolve and incorporate logic, probabilities, learning and background knowledge. Almost all modern AI applications use this hybrid machine learning approach.

Further Reading

You can read more about Turing’s ideas here and how they have influenced the development of AI in the following article:
Muggleton, S. (2014). Alan Turing and the development of Artificial Intelligence. AI Communications. https://doi.org/10.3233_AIC-130579.

Turing’s original 1950 paper was:

A. Turing. (1950) Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59(236):435–460, and you can read the text here

What have you learnt about Alan Turing and his work that is still relevant today?

Record your thoughts in your learning diary before you move on….

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