News: A genuine milestone for artificial intelligence

January 16, 2006
Richard Macey, the link

ROBOTS have a reason to party: this year is the 50th anniversary of artificial intelligence.

In 1956 John McCarthy, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, convened a meeting of computer specialists at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.

"It was the dawn of the computing era," said Claude Sammut, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of NSW and leader of its Artificial Intelligence Research Group.

Professor McCarthy's meeting "brought together the small number of people who were writing AI programs. He had to invent some new name for what they were doing, so he called it artificial intelligence". The name stuck.

"When most people think of artificial intelligence they think of robots like C3PO in Stars Wars," Professor Sammut said. But intelligent robots did not always adopt humanoid shapes.

He noted a Brisbane container terminal had been fully automated, with cranes programmed to locate and collect containers. "The cranes are basically robots. They can operate without a driver and know which containers have to be taken off which ships.

"And there's a company in Sydney that makes programs that help pathologists interpret blood tests. The computer generates a detailed report. The pathologist is still there, checking, but it speeds up the pathologist's job."