Early AI in Britain: Turing et al.

Abstract

This article presents an overview of Turing's early contributions to machine intelligence, together with a summary of his influence on other early practitioners. Following his famous work on the Entscheidungsproblem in the 1930s, Turing staked out the field of machine intelligence during the 1940s. His wartime Bombe used what we now call heuristic search to do work requiring intelligence when done by humans. In key papers in 1948 and 1950 he discussed search, learning, robotics, chess, the theorem-proving approach to AI, the genetic algorithm concept, and artificial neural networks, as well as introducing the Turing test. He influenced the first generation of programmers in Britain, whose pioneering contributions to machine intelligence included work on board games, learning, language-processing, and reasoning—contributions made years before the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was coined at Dartmouth in 1956.