 | Many of the leading thinkers of the 18th and 19th century were convinced that a formal reasoning system, based on a kind of mathematics, could encode all human thought and be used to solve every sort of problem. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was sure that such a system existed, and only needed to be discovered. The idea still has currency - the history of recent artificial intelligence is replete with stories of systems that seek to "axiomatize" logic inside computers.
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| | George Boole introduces the "Laws of Thought"
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From 1800 on, the philosophy of reason picked up speed. George Boole proposed a system of "laws of thought," Boolean Logic, which uses "AND" and "OR" and "NOT" to establish how ideas and objects relate to each other. Most Internet search engines use Boolean logic in their searches; you can say that you want all the pages about "dolphins NOT (Miami OR football)" to find all the pages about dolphins which don't mention the Miami Dolphins football team.
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| | Philosophers focus their attention on the problems of logic
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In the 20th century, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead published Principia Mathematica, which turned formal logic on its head. Philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein began to turn philosophy into the logical analysis of knowledge, focusing their interests on the problem of logic.
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| | Recent history and information theory
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In the early part of the 20th century, multidisciplinary interests began to converge. Engineers began to view brain synapses as mechanistic constructs. "Cybernetics," the study of communication and control in biological and mechanical systems, became a well-known word. Vannevar Bush’s legendary essay "As We May Think" appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945, predicting the globally linked networks of the future. Claude Shannon pioneered a theory of information, explaining how information was created and how it might be encoded and compressed.
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| | The emergence of the electronic computer
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Enter the computer. Modern artificial intelligence (albeit not so named until later) was born in the first half of the 20th century, when the electronic computer came into being.
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| | Alan Turing's groundbreaking work
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The computer's memory was a purely symbolic landscape, and the perfect place to bring together the philosophy and the engineering of the last 2000 years. The pioneer of this synthesis was the British logician and computer Scientist Alan Turing. | | | |
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