Peter Bentley

This is a classic AI heuristic (rule of thumb) that says if you can assign scores to your own moves and the moves of your opponent, and look ahead a few moves, then you should pick the moves that result in the best score for yourself to maximize your chances of winning while minimizing the chances of your opponent winning.

Neurobiologist William Grey Walter, based at the University of Bristol and a pioneer of the electroencephalograph (EEG machine) was one of the scientists who tried to understand intelligence in this

Cybernetics was the first formal study of intelligence, by considering cybernetic loops – the idea that an animal or a machine exhibits behaviour because its sensors detect something, which affects its controller.

The controller performs an action in response that then results in an effect to some external system: its environment. The change is then detected by the sensors, which affect the controller, and so on, in a loop. Cybernetics was the first attempt at understanding intelligence in this way, and those such as Grey Walter who tried to build cybernetic systems were making the first electronic artificial intelligences.

the 1950s, Alan Turing was already a high achiever in his field. He was the first to define a mathematical notion of what computers were. He also proved they would always have some limitations – for example, a computer cannot always figure out if its program will halt or not. Because of this we discovered that some problems are not computable – they just cannot be calculated by a computer. Turing helped design and program some of the first computers in the world.

Turochamp is generally considered to be one of the first ever computer games to be developed

Disappointing perhaps, but given its extremely limited thought process, only looking ahead a couple of moves, this early AI did pretty well. Even without Turing around to give it a helping hand.

The researchers discovered to their surprise that Turing had probably cheated in the original game, not playing moves suggested by the program when they seemed suboptimal.

Alan Turing had strong beliefs about the likely future capabilities of computers. He predicted that people would ‘speak of machines thinking’ by the end of the century. He also believed that by then we would be able to program computers such that when chatting to them we would not be able to tell if they were human or machine. Turing claimed that ‘an average interrogator will not have more than a 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning.’ He called this the Imitation Game (which also became the title of a biographical movie made about Turing in 2014). Today we refer to it as the Turing Test.

what turned out to be some of his last work, published in 1952, Turing recognized that there is more than one kind of intelligence. He investigated morphogenesis, or how we develop into complex organisms from a single cell.