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| The concept of the "thinking machine" appears throughout history, from Pygmalion, to HAL 9000, to Steven Spielberg's film, "A.I." The desire to breathe life into sculpted clay - or today, into silicon - has been with us for thousands of years. |
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When the computer first appeared in the 1950s, we seemed closer than ever to creating an "electronic brain." Yet, the major goal of artificial intelligence research - to create a machine that can communicate like a person - has yet to be achieved. Artificial intelligence has given us everything from PARRY, the paranoid chatbot, to Japanese fuzzy logic rice cookers, but it hasn't yet produced a computer that can carry on a conversation.
Today, the field of artificial intelligence can be described as a global primordial soup of cognitive and computer science, psychology, linguistics, and mathematics, waiting for that flash of lightning - an interdisciplinary effort bringing together researchers and resources, developing new approaches, utilizing the world's storehouse of knowledge, to generate the spark that will create a new form of life. |
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