The First Ever AI Company - That was successful :)

The first AI program was run on this thing ⬇️

Yep, It was 1951

The first ever successful AI program was written by a guy named Christopher Strachey, on that thing ⬆️

The computer was based at the University of Manchester in England

And 1 year later in the summer of 1952 this program AI could play a complete game of checkers at a reasonable speed.

This is cool in all,

But; this information was all reimagined by later people as none of this information was legitimately published on paper making this information unreliable

So, this brings us to Shopper - the first legitimately documented AI Program

The Earliest Successful AI Program

The earliest successful demonstration of machine learning was published in 1952 with Shopper written by a man named Anthony Oettinger

Shopper was a program written by Anthony Oettinger at the University of Cambridge, running on a EDSAC computer

Shopper simulated a mall with eight shops

When instructed to purchase an item, Shopper would search for it, visiting shops at random until the item was found.

While searching, Shopper would memorize a few of the items stocked in each shop visited (just as a human shopper might).

The next time Shopper was sent out for the same item, or for some other item that it had already located, it would go to the right shop straight away.

This simple form of learning, is called Rote Learning.

This tech was super impressive back then, but now? Not so much

Further Advancements

In 1955 Samuel added features that enabled the program to learn from experience.

Samuel included mechanisms for both rote learning and improvements to the AI model

These advancements eventually led to his program’s winning one game against a former Connecticut checkers champion named Robert Nealey in 1962

Samuel’s checkers program was also notable for being one of the first efforts at evolutionary computing (AI)

Samuel’s program “evolved” by pitting a modified copy against the current best version of his program, with the winner becoming the new standard.

How This Very Simple AI Program Has Effected Modern Day

Now, let’s get into a bit of nerdy stuff…

How has this super simple AI program affected today’s hyper-advanced AI models?

The early efforts in evolutionary computing, like Arthur Samuel's checkers program, laid the foundation for evolutionary AI algorithms used today.

Evolutionary computation techniques, inspired by biological evolution, are now widely applied in solving complex optimization problems and continuous optimization tasks in modern AI systems

Recent studies on training methods for AI models, inspired by early learning mechanisms like rote learning and generalization enhancements

Are shaping how modern AI algorithms are trained. New approaches aim to create compositional machine learning models that can generalize effectively like human intelligence

💭 Quote of the Week 

❝ 

The question is not whether intelligent machines can have any emotions, but whether machines can be intelligent without any emotions.

^{Marvin Minsky (1986)}

This post was a bit shorter this week,

It was super difficult to find the information - as for the pieces I did find, it was limited

But this shows how far back AI Programs have been in the making for

This simple AI program has been the tree roots of AI - the birth

Only now we started to see significant and impactful advancements in the world of AI

Oh, and also, welcome to our 1 new Legend!

Keep Embracing the Future, One Byte at a Time! 🔄

See you next week