Artificial Intelligence in Byte-sized Chunks

The Second World War brought devastation and horrific suffering for millions of people. But like all wars, it acted as a catalyst for rapid technological advancement

their own ways at surviving in their respective niches.

Biological brains

Grey Walter likened their brains to two sensory neurons: one for light, one for touch.

He predicted that people would ‘speak of machines thinking’ by the end of the century.

The researchers discovered to their surprise that Turing had probably cheated in the original game, not playing moves suggested by the program when they seemed suboptimal.

This is a classic AI heuristic (rule of thumb) that says if you can assign scores to your own moves and the moves of your opponent, and look ahead a few moves, then you should pick the moves that result in the best score for yourself to maximize your chances of winning while minimizing the chances of your opponent winning.

The controller performs an action in response that then results in an effect to some external system: its environment. The change is then detected by the sensors, which affect the controller, and so on, in a loop

The creature therefore lingers before a mirror, flickering, twittering, and jigging like a clumsy Narcissus. The behaviour of a creature thus engaged with its own reflection is quite specific, and on a purely empirical basis, if it were observed in an animal, might be accepted as evidence of some degree of self-awareness.

But a world where we have working AI pervasive throughout our technology also means something else. It means that we do not always know if an image or piece of music or even a passage of text is written by a human or not. This blurring of creative authorship challenges our traditional notions of creativity and authenticity in the digital age.

would always have some limitations – for example, a computer cannot always figure out if its program will halt or not. Because of this we discovered that some problems are not computable – they just cannot be calculated by a