1 What Is Artificial Intelligence?

In today's terms, artificial intelligence (AI) is best understood as a special branch of computer science. Historically, the boundary between AI and computer science was in fact less clear-cut. The history of computer science is intimately linked with the history of AI. When Alan Turing invented the general-purpose computer in 1936 (on paper!), he was evidently thinking about how to model a person doing something clever—namely, a specific kind of mathematical calculation. Turing was also one of the first to speculate that the machine he invented for that purpose could be used to reproduce humanlike intelligence more generally. In this sense, the father of computer science is also the father of AI. But other computer pioneers also thought about computing machinery in human (indeed anthropomorphic) terms. For instance, John von Neumann, in a famous 1945 paper introducing the architecture still used by computers today, used a term from psychology, “memory,” to refer to a computer's storage units.