From a tape, an eye and a pencil to artificial intelligence (Part 1)

The 21st century is full of big titles on how we built intelligent machines. New robot to cook you some dinner. A car that drives itself. A system that knows what movie you wanna watch better than you do. And pretty much every year or two you can hear claims that we are on the verge of discovering real artificial intelligence. But what is intelligence on its own? And did our algorithms reach it already? Let's take a brief journey through the origins of humans' attempts to create thinking machines.

In early 20th century mathematicans were trying to find the core of mathematics, the very fundamentals which can be used to derive all the rest. They struggled a lot, because when they already nearly agreed, after lots of conflicts, that arithmetics is the root of all maths, there came the set theory to ruin it all. They were not able to crunch it down to arithmetics, so they decided to try to reverse the problem and express arithmetics with set theory stuff. That is yet to be finished...

When in 1936 Alan Turing presented his paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, there was no "information science" or "computer science" yet, at least officially. And if even today, after so much development in those areas, artificial intelligence is still pretty fresh, new and undiscovered, how could people possibly think about it back then? Well, they did. They did a lot. And it is actually how it all started.

Turing's approach was kind of revolutionary because instead of trying to find connections and relations between different parts of mathematics, he imagined a simplest mathematican and what they could do. Simplest piece of paper to write on? Let's get a tape divided into single-sign cells. Pencil to write on that tape? One that can write a single sign at a time. How to read all that? Let's get an eye which can read a single cell from the tape at a time. The only things that our mathematican does are read a sign in the current cell, write something there and move one cell left or right, following a strict procedure. That's it! Our mathematican can be a machine!

As you may expect, some of the scientific society disagreed, or even felt offended. Did you really expect that such a thing would solve problems like we, intelligent creatures, do?

Well, it does. Or at least, we have some proofs that it computes pretty well, and nobody could proove that it doesn't do that universally. Even though the Church-Turing Thesis, which can be simplified to "Every intuitively solvable problem can be solved by a Turing machine", cannot be proven (because what is intuitively solvable?), that abstract Turing machine remain the very basic model of a computer until today.

Back to artificial intelligence - we are trying to use computers to run algorithms that can adapt to certain situations and provide desired results for inputs they were not explicitly prepared for. And computers are some implementations of universal Turing machines... So wait, am I trying to say that a limited eye, pencil and some tape, along with a few rules are enough to create something intelligent? Well, the answer is the most frustrating one: it depends. Because what does intelligent mean?

(Part 2)