Peter Bentley

The Second World War brought devastation and horrific suffering for millions of people. But like all wars, it acted as a catalyst for rapid technological advancement

their own ways at surviving in their respective niches.

Biological brains

Grey Walter likened their brains to two sensory neurons: one for light, one for touch.

But a world where we have working AI pervasive throughout our technology also means something else. It means that we do not always know if an image or piece of music or even a passage of text is written by a human or not. This blurring of creative authorship challenges our traditional notions of creativity and authenticity in the digital age. And in case you just noticed a change of style, that previous sentence was generated by an AI, when asked to add to the first two sentences in this paragraph.

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.