Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a multidisciplinary computer science technique designed to achieve "intelligent" machines or programs. The history of artificial intelligence dates back to the 40s of the 20th century, but it is only in recent years that artificial intelligence has really begun to play an important role due to the maturity of the technology and the support of big data.
Here are some of the important periods and events in the history of AI:
1. 40s of the 20th century: Alan Turing proposed the "Turing Test", which explored the question of whether machines can think and express like humans.
2. 50s of the 20th century: John McCarthy and others began to explore the basic theory of artificial intelligence, coined the term "artificial intelligence", and carried out early artificial intelligence research.
3. The 60s of the 20th century: The research and application of artificial intelligence began to receive widespread attention. John McCarthy of Stanford University and others have proposed the concept of "Expert Systems," an application of artificial intelligence that can be used to solve complex problems.
4. 70s of the 20th century: There was a bottleneck in the research of artificial intelligence, because expert systems could only deal with problems in specific areas, and there was no effective solution to complex real-world problems.
5. 80s of the 20th century: The research of artificial intelligence began to shift to the field of "machine learning", that is, computers learn laws and patterns from data to simulate the human learning process. At the same time, neural networks and statistical-based methods are beginning to be widely used.
6. The 90s of the 20th century: The development of artificial intelligence technology accelerated, and the performance and storage capacity of computer hardware were greatly improved, so that the application field of artificial intelligence has been more widely expanded, such as speech recognition, image processing, natural language processing, etc.
7. 21st century: With the development of the Internet and big data, artificial intelligence has been more widely used, such as search engines, recommendation systems, driverless driving, smart homes, etc. At the same time, the rise of technologies such as deep learning has also made major breakthroughs in the application of artificial intelligence in the fields of image and speech.
In general, the history of artificial intelligence can be divided into different stages such as early basic theoretical research, the application of expert systems, the development of machine learning and neural networks, and the rise of big data and deep learning. The development of these stages has promoted the continuous maturity of artificial intelligence technology and the continuous expansion of application fields.