Brief Introduction

The term “Artificial Intelligence” was first proposed as a research field at the Dartmouth Conference in 1956. Scientists led by John McCarthy (the inventor of LISP and a Turing Award winner), Marvin Minsky (an expert in artificial intelligence and cognitive science), Claude Shannon (the founder of information theory), and Allen Newell (a computer scientist) jointly studied and explored issues related to simulating intelligence with machines. They first put forward the concept of “Artificial Intelligence”, marking the official birth of this emerging discipline. However, the dream of “creating machines that can think and act like humans” can be traced back to ancient Greece. For instance, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC) laid down the basic laws of formal logic. But it was not until after the advent of electronic computers that the practical application and development of artificial intelligence began. In 1936, Turing proposed the Turing machine model, which could simulate any mechanical formal algorithm through basic operations such as reading, writing, moving the read–write head left and right, laying the foundation for the theoretical model of modern electronic computers. In 1946, the world's first general-purpose computer, ENIAC, was born.