of discrete steps leading to a determined end, is at the heart of every computer program. History of Artificial Intelligence Despite extensive research into the theory of computers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, electronic programmable computers were not successfully built until the early 1940s. These computers, the most notable of which was the ENIAC, consisted of large banks of vacuum tubes and were used by the US Military to calculate missile ballistics tables. Computers were used as essentially nothing more than huge number crunchers for ten years, until they gained interest among the scientific community. In 1950, British mathematician Alan Turing published his paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," in which he outlines his idea for a 'Turing test' to determine whether or not a computer is intelligent. Haugeland describes the test as a game in which a person communicates with two subjects, one human and one computer. Both subjects attempt to make the tester identify them as the human. When, Turing says, the tester is able to correctly identify the human no more than half the time, the computer has won and should be thought of as intelligent (6). Turing's previous work in the 1930s had been pivotal in laying the groundwork of artificial intelligence; Turing and Alonzo Church proved independently that Turing machines, the simplest possible computers, were capable of solving any algorithm, including theoretically all those that go on inside the human head, if given enough time and memory. The first practical efforts at creating an intelligent program began in the 1950s as well, primarily with game playing computers. The first notable chess program, MANIAC., was completed in 1956 by Stanislaw Ulam at the scientific research center in Los Alamos that had, 15 years earlier, spearheaded the creation of the atomic bomb. According to chess master Alex Bernstein, MANIAC played a "respectable beginner's game" and...
