me. No one can even be sure that the others he or she sees are, in fact, conscious beings. It is difficult to imagine what a computer would have to do to prove that it is conscious, or what a seemingly rational human would have to do to prove that he or she is not. The formal study of artificial intelligence -- intelligent action exhibited by non-organic objects -- had its inauspicious beginnings nearly 170 years ago with Charles Babbage's conception of his Analytical Engine in 1833, an early prototype of the programmable computer (Johnson 61). Lady Ada Lovelace, upon learning of the engine, remarked that it would be possible to communicate with it as one would with a human, if only the cardboard cards that stored its instructions were punched the right way. She went on to study the capabilities of algebraic manipulation that such a machine would have, and experimented with techniques of writing programs, earning her the distinction of being popularly known as the first computer scientist. Although engineering difficulties prevented Babbage from completing the engine, it paved the way for further developments in the field of numerical computation. While the Analytical Engine was the first attempt at instantiation of what would now be known as a computer, it was by no means the first conception of one. People had long recognized the difficulties inherent in the study of mathematics and formal logical systems without any kind of automation, and used simple tools such as the abacus to remedy them. In 1617, mathematician John Napier developed Napier's Bones, a collection of digits printed on bone that was the. forerunner of the sliderule (Kurzweil 161). In what is the first reference in recorded literature to some-thing recognizable as artificial intelligence today, a dialogue by Plato recounts Socrates as asking Euthryphro for a fail-proof algorithm to determine the nature of piety (Dreyfus 67). An algorithm, or finite collection ...
