Let's take a look at the past and present of artificial intelligence.

When artificial intelligence (AI) becomes a hot word, a brief history of artificial intelligence sorts out the origins, names, births, factional struggles, evolutionary evolution, and even genetic variation of artificial intelligence. . Let's take a look at the related content with the network communication Xiaobian.

Nick, chairman of Wuzhen think tank, expert of the national “Thousand Talents Program”. Studying in the US, working at Harvard and HP. In recent years, between China and the United States, venture capital investment. For the writing of A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence, Nick's idea is simple: "Now artificial intelligence is so hot, you need a book to explain the history of development. There is no decent artificial intelligence science book in China."

Nick admits that he has written such a book. His teacher, Barto and his brother Sutton, are masters in the field of artificial intelligence. They invented the "enhanced learning" algorithm. In 2016, AlphaGo defeated the top Go players in the world, making the Google DeepMind team famous. AlphaGo's core algorithm is reinforcement learning. Half of the founding members of this team are Sutton students. Barto's teacher, Holland, invented the "genetic algorithm", the first doctoral degree in computer science in the United States, and their teacher's inheritance was derived from von Neumann. Nick joked that "I am a high score."

In the past two or three years, artificial intelligence has developed and applied rapidly in China. Although it is still the European and American countries that play a leading role in technology, the gap is getting smaller and smaller. Nick's "A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence" covers almost all areas of artificial intelligence: artificial intelligence origin, automatic theorem proving, neural networks, natural language processing, etc., but Nick emphasizes that in each chapter, only some typical main lines are selected, and Did not cover all.

"Historship has two ways of writing, focusing on people and things." Obviously, Nick tends to be more inclined to the former. There are algorithmic principles in the book, and some people inherit the ideas, and there are various technical factions fighting for infighting. He wrote in the foreword: "The history of gossip, the readers naturally like it, and the author is also good, just like after the First World War, British Prime Minister Lloyd George to his Governor of Jerusalem: There is a dispute, our politicians will come in handy. If they stop and don't fight, you will lose your job."

He said that science has a way of writing complex principles in some seemingly common language, but he has never believed in this method. Whether the author is an expert or a science writer, "I have never seen a book that can be used to quantum mechanics." A well-discussed science book. Even if it is as simple as a machine, there is little proper reading. But those books that tell history and gossip are fascinating."

The word "artificial intelligence" was first proposed by who, and Nick did a detailed research. It is now widely accepted that the term was coined by John McCarthy, the convenor of the 1956 Dartmouth College Summer Symposium (the origin of artificial intelligence), which is actually a misunderstanding. McCarthy admitted in his later years that the word was first heard from others, but he could not remember who it was. Later, the British mathematician Woodward said that he was the original creator of the word AI because he visited MIT in 1956 and exchanged with McCarthy. But McCarthy used the term "artificial intelligence" in 1955. Most of the parties have now passed away, and this matter is likely to be unsuccessful.

Since 1956, more than 60 years of turmoil, this new discipline has peaked and moved forward, and the main line has been mixed. Nick has collected a lot of first-hand historical materials. From time to time, there is an anecdote of the historical protagonist. Not isolated, not thin, with image metaphors, there are ancient and modern, and there are also shields of sub-spears. Reading this kind of "clip gun with a stick" narrative comment is like when you are eating a snack, you don't know if the next mouth is sweet or so.

Whether artificial intelligence can surpass humans has always been a controversy after the birth of this species. "Singularity is approaching" - the intelligence of the machine reaches human intelligence in 2020, and the machine intelligence will surpass the human intelligence in 2045. This is a selling point that makes artificial intelligence attract widespread public attention. At the same time, it also causes the public to artificial intelligence. The panic and technology worship. The most representative of this controversy is the two veterans of the field, "Sky" - Minsky and Chomsky. Minsky said in an interview with his student, prophet and singularity theory cooker Kuzwell in 2012 that he believes that the arrival of singularity may be in our lifetime. Nick did not comment on this, but objectively wrote: "Minsky died in Boston on January 24, 2016. It is said that in order to wait for the singularity, his old man has frozen himself."

For the general public, the most concerned about what artificial intelligence can do, as far as technology itself is concerned, many people do not understand it. While writing the development of the technical genre, he has been trying to sort out various connections, including academic inheritance, ideological influence, and life influence between characters.

For example, since Turing proposed "machine and intelligence", there have been two views: one group believes that the realization of artificial intelligence must use logic and symbolic systems. This school sees the problem from top to bottom; there is also a group that believes in mimicking the brain. It is possible to achieve artificial intelligence. This faction is bottom-up. They think that if a machine can be built to simulate the neural network in the brain, this machine will be intelligent. Therefore, Nick gave the former group a "want to come and swear", and the latter group called "eat å•¥ å•¥". The two factions have once died and lived. Today, the "eat and supplement" group represented by Google's brain has the upper hand.

With the increase in the amount of data and the establishment of ecosystems such as mobile terminals, the development of the artificial intelligence industry has been extremely rapid in recent years, and capital has also gathered in large numbers. Looking back at the ups and downs of artificial intelligence for several decades, Nick found that each climax is a technical repackaging of old philosophical ideas, and each decline is due to the promise of the climax of the period can not be honored.

"At the moment of entrepreneurship in the field of artificial intelligence, some social idlers who have nothing to do with artificial intelligence have become AI experts overnight, and then want to do it after getting VC." Nick is deeply worried about this.