Silicon smarts

When a select band of computer scientists met at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1956 to begin work on a field they called'artificial intelligence', they were optimistic, to say the least. Their founding principle of developing machine intelligence was based on an assumption that human intelligence could itself be well characterized. They argued that: "Every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it." Ask ten people to define human intelligence and you will get at least eleven answers. To a philosopher, intelligence is the absence of a lack of intelligence.