Shaw and Artificial Intelligence

Shaw, always ahead of his time, had an impact on the development of AI, especially because of his connection to Alan Turing. Shaw’s life ran parallel to the development of computing machines. Shaw died in 1950, and only six years later, in 1956 the expression “artificial intelligence” was coined by John McCarthy, Mathematics professor at Dartmouth College, at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence (DSRPAI) hosted by him and Marvin L. Minsky of Harvard University (James Moore. “The Dartmouth College Artificial Intelligence Conference: The Next Fifty Years,” AI Magazine, 27.4 (2006) [© AAAI].). In “A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence,” written by McCarthy and Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester (I.B.M. Corporation), and Claude S Shannon (Bell Telephone Laboratories), AI is described as follows: “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” They wanted to find out how to “make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves” (J. McCarthy, M. L. Minsky, N. Rochester, C. E. Shannon. “A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence,” 31 August 1955. https://ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/1904 ). This chapter focuses on Shaw and Alan Turing, in particular on Turing’s Oracle machine.