First cars

For the successful creation of artificial intelligence requires, firstly, intelligence and, secondly, an artifact. The most preferred artifact in this area has always been a computer. Modern digital electronic computer was invented independently and almost simultaneously by scientists of the three countries participating in the Second World War. The first operating computer was the Heath Robinson electromechanical device, created in 1940 by the Alan Turing group for the sole purpose of deciphering messages transmitted by German troops.

In 1943, the same group developed a powerful general-purpose computer, called the Colossus, in the design of which electronic lamps were used.

The first operational computer programmed was the Z-3 computer, invented by Konrad Zuse in Germany in 1941. Zuse also invented floating-point numbers and created the first high-level programming language, Plankalkiil .

The first electronic computer, ABC, was assembled by John Atanasov and his student Clifford Berry from 1940 to 1942 at the University of Iowa. Atanasov's research received almost no support or recognition; As it turned out, the ENIAC computer, developed as part of a secret military project at the University of Pennsylvania with a team of specialists, which included John Mauchly and John Eckert, had the greatest influence on the development of modern computers.

Over the past half-century, several generations of computer hardware have appeared, each of which was characterized by an increase in speed and performance, as well as a decrease in price.

The performance of computers created on the basis of silicon chips doubles approximately every 18 months, and this growth rate has been observed for two decades. After reaching the limits of this growth, molecular engineering or some other new technology will be required.

Of course, computing devices existed before the advent of an electronic computer. One of the first automated devices, which appeared in the XVII century. The first programmable device was a loom, invented in 1805 by Joseph Maria Jacquard (1752 - 1834), which used punched cards for storing instructions for weaving fabric patterns.

In the middle of the XIX century, Charles Babbage (1792-1871) developed two cars, but did not manage to finish one of them. His "difference machine" was intended to calculate the mathematical tables used in engineering and scientific projects. Later this machine was built and its work was demonstrated in 1991 in the London Museum of Science.

Babbage's other design, the “ analytical machine ” project, was much more ambitious: this machine provided for the use of addressable memory, stored programs and conditional jumps, and it was the first artifact capable of performing universal calculations.

Babbage's colleague Ada Lovelace, the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, was perhaps the world's first programmer. (The programming language Ada was named in her honor . ) She wrote programs for an unfinished analytical machine and even thought that this machine could play chess or compose music.

Artificial intelligence is also largely bound to those areas of computer science that are related to software, because it is within these areas that the operating systems, programming languages ​​and tools necessary for writing modern programs (and articles about them) are created.

But this area of ​​scientific activity is also one of those where artificial intelligence fully reimburses its debt: work in the field of artificial intelligence became the source of many ideas that were then embodied in the main directions of computer science development, including time sharing, interactive interpreters, personal computers with window interfaces and support of positioning devices, use of accelerated processing environment, creation of data types in the form of linked lists, automatic management ie memory and key concepts of symbolic, functional, dynamic and object-oriented programming.