The Origins of AI — From Turing to the First Programs

In 1950, British mathematician Alan Turing published a groundbreaking paper called "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." In it, he asked: "Can machines think?" To answer this, he proposed the Turing Test — if a machine could chat with a human and fool them into thinking it was another human, then it could be considered intelligent.

This idea sparked huge interest. In the summer of 1956, a small group of scientists gathered at Dartmouth College in the United States for a workshop. John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon organized the event. They coined the term "Artificial Intelligence" and boldly predicted that machines could be made to simulate any aspect of human intelligence.

The early years were full of optimism. One of the first AI programs was the Logic Theorist (1955–56), created by Allen Newell and Herbert Simon. It could prove mathematical theorems — something previously thought to require human creativity. Another early success was ELIZA (1966), a simple chatbot that mimicked a therapist by turning users' statements into questions.

These early programs worked with rules written by humans. Computers at the time were slow and had very little memory compared to today, but the foundations were laid: the idea that intelligence could be programmed and studied scientifically.

This period set the stage for everything that followed. The dream was born, even if the technology needed decades to catch up.