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Artificial Intelligence has had a rocky history. In 1956 Herb Simon, one of the discipline's four founders, claimed "Within 20 years, computers will be able to do anything a man can do." Yet many of the things we think of when we think of true artificial intelligence - such as understanding nuanced language, solving novel problems, learning through experience and being able to use that knowledge - are just starting to be real phenomenon.

It's important to differentiate between strong AI - which requires sapience and logical reasoning abilities - and weak AI, which merely tweaks the software, or uses specialized programming languages, to create a program tailored to the narrow function required. Strong AI is a lot more difficult to program and requires innovative methods of computing.

Back in the day (aka 1950), Alan Turing published his paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, and was in support of the functionalist approach to AI (machines can be considered "thinking" if their behavior is comparable to human behavior). The famed "Turing test" for AI involves a human subject who attempts to guess if they are interacting with a person or a machine (over the computer or via writing).

The most famous counter-argument is John Searle's "Chinese room" thought experiment. In theory, a man who does not speak Chinese could sit in a room and receive text queries, written in Chinese, from other people just outside the door. The man could then follow a series of steps using the input and generate a reasonable reply without have to have understood any of the actual meaning. A computer program that passes the Turing test may appear to be carrying on a real conversation while having no actual comprehension, just as the man in the "Chinese room" does not actually understand any Chinese.

The trick, it seems, is to program a system that DOES understand what is passing through it. Understanding raises interesting yet somewhat unanswerable questions about consciousness, memory, learning, and the will to do something unique with the knowledge acquired. This discussion becomes very abstract very fast, but different approaches to AI are advancing our understanding of what computers are and what they are capable of being.

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