Artificial intelligence is a technology which enables a machine to simulate human behavior. Machine learning is a subset of AI which allows a machine to automatically learn from past data without programming explicitly. The goal of AI is to make a smart computer system like humans to solve complex problems.
The history of AI and machine learning
So where did AI come from? Well, it didn’t leap from single-player chess games straight into self-driving cars. The field has a long history rooted in military science and statistics, with contributions from philosophy, psychology, math and cognitive science. Artificial intelligence originally set out to make computers more useful and more capable of independent reasoning.
Most historians trace the birth of AI to a Dartmouth research project in 1956 that explored topics like problem solving and symbolic methods. In the 1960s, the US Department of Defense took interest in this type of work and increased the focus on training computers to mimic human reasoning.
For example, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) completed street mapping projects in the 1970s. And DARPA produced intelligent personal assistants in 2003, long before Google, Amazon or Microsoft tackled similar projects.
