ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Artificial intelligence is the name given to an enormous area of research and technological innovation, the growth of which is based on firm foundations laid around 40 years ago by some famous names in the field of science. The most prominent of these was surely Marvin L. Minsky who, thanks to his incredible creative and analytical capabilities, was able to put to work fully the fruit of his research.Studies in this fascinating area started when A.I. didn't even have a name and the practical objective of the applications was to create machines able to act intelligently.

As a student, Minsky had dreamed of producing machines which could learn by providing them with memory "neurones" connected to "synapses"; the machine would also have to possess past memory in order to function efficiently when faced with different situations.

In 1951 the "machine" was born, consisting of a labyrinth of valves, small motors, gears and wires linking up the various "neurones". Some of these wires were connected up at random to the various memory banks in order to achieve a degree of causality of events. The reason such a machine had been put together was to try and find the exit from a maze where the machine would play the part of a rat whose progress would be monitored on a light network.

When the system was completed it was possible to follow all the movements of the 'rat' within the maze and it was only through a design fault that it was found more than one 'rat' could be introduced which would then interact together. After various casual attempts the rats started 'thinking' on a logical basis helped along by reinforcement of correct choices made and the more advanced rats would then be followed by the ones left behind. This first practical example, built by Minsky with the help of Dean Edmonds, also included numerous casual connections between its various 'neurones', acting like a sort of nervous system able to overcome any eventual information interruption due to one of the neurones failing.

The first practical example of learning had been made without the use of any computers as the memory available in machines at that time was very little indeed.

The phrase 'Artificial Intelligence' had not yet been coined and was instead used for the first time towards the mid fifties by J.McCarthy and Minsky when the first AI research group was formed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This group is today still considered to be one of the most prestigious in the world in its field. By taking advantage of the laboratory structures available, together with the collaboration of some enthusiastic students, the group, as a first effort, managed to produce a mechanical arm capable of catching a ball thrown at it (1968).

While McCarthy busied himself with new advanced computer languages, Minsky followed his main objective of creating a computer which would not just be a normal number crunching machine but one that could instead think for itself on the basis of analogy. To this end he came up with a new type of computer which he put to use for didactic ends through the use of the new programming language created by Seymour Papert, "LOGO".

This language was very simple and allowed even children to program and visualise a geometric figure in movement without having to feed in complex formulae. The project was sold to Texas Instruments who decided to use "Logo2" as the language for its own domestic computers.
These inevitable first attempts in the right direction were based on the conviction that every aspect of learning, or any other intelligence trait for that matter, could be simulated by a computer.

Many questions arose and many more came from the students at MIT: Why should intelligence be programmed instead of being created spontaneously by a specially designed nervous system? It was thanks to his experience with these very same students that Minsky managed to focus on the complex problems concerning logical reasoning and began to gain a global view of the problems involved, without leaving aside the apparently marginal details.

Instead of following the sort of thinking that led to the birth of 'Perceptron', a complex machine for visual recognition created by Frank Rosenblatt in 1958, Minsky put to use his previous rat-in-a-maze research in the construction of electronic machines capable of learning. He had understood that the way ahead was that of studying the principles which allow a machine to learn rather than to build one and then hope it will work.
A substantial sum of money was given to the MIT in 1963 to finance continued research into AI and Minsky along with his ex students (who had mean-while become mathematicians and scientists) committed themselves to solving the non-arithmetical problems of the computer.
In a short time the research group managed to develop advanced programs (written in Lisp on IBM 7090) able to break down complex problems into small more manageable sized pieces which could be tackled with no difficulty. This project was given the name Macsyma.

Parallel to this, valid analogous reasoning programs were developed which allowed the computer to recognise and manipulate different geometrical figures correctly. This last exercise drew criticism from certain psychologists who contested the computer's ability to see and recognise the figures in the normal definition of these terms. In the same period, Minsky and his group also turned their attention to the problems of translating from one language to another and robotics.

In his research into translation, Minsky came up against the problem of translating a phrase in the right context and this dissuaded him from venturing no further than adopting the program by B.Raphael which incorporated decision-making on the basis of meaning in a certain context.