All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

No abstract

& The expression ''artificial intelligence'' (AI) was introduced by John McCarthy, and the official birth of AI is unanimously considered to be the 1956 Dartmouth Conference. Thus, AI turned fifty in 2006. How did AI begin? Several differently motivated analyses have been proposed as to its origins. In this paper a brief look at those that might be considered steps towards Dartmouth is attempted, with the aim of showing how a number of research topics and controversies that marked the short history of AI were touched on, or fairly well stated, during the year immediately preceding Dartmouth. The framework within which those steps were taken was the development of digital computers. Earlier computer applications in areas such as complex decision making and management, at that time dealt with by operations research techniques, were important in this story. The time was ripe for AI's intriguingly tumultuous development, marked as it has been by hopes and defeats, successes and difficulties.As is well known, the 1956 summer Dartmouth Conference on AI was preceded by a preparatory document dated August 31, 1955, whose authors were John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon. The meeting's aim was to examine ''the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it,'' as one reads in the document (McCarthy et al. 1955). Some of the main pioneers in computer programming were present at Dartmouth, such as Allen Newell, Arthur Samuel, Oliver Selfridge, and Herbert Simon. After Dartmouth, the historical centers of AI research would be formed: at Carnegie-Mellon University with Newell and Simon, at MIT with Minsky, and at Stanford This paper is based on a talk given at the 9th Congress of AI Ã IA, Milan, September 21-23, 2005. I would like to thank Stefania Bandini and Luigia Carlucci Aiello for inviting me. I had the opportunity to present an analogous talk in other places, and to further discuss the main topics of the present paper. I would like to express my thanks to

No abstract

Abstract. In this paper I start from a definition of"cuiture of the artificial" which might be stated by referring to the background of philosophical, methodological, pragmatical assumptions which characterizes the development of the information processing analysis of mental processes and of some trends in contemporary cognitive science: in a word, the development of AI as a candidate science of mind. The aim of this paper is to show how (with which plausibility and limitations) the discovery of the mentioned background might be dated back to a period preceding the cybernetic era, the decade 1930--1940 at least. Therefore a somewhat detailed analysis of Hull's "robot approach" is given, as well as of some of its independent and future developments.