The minds that built AI and the writer who adored them ZDNet

Forty-one years ago, Pamela McCorduck wrote a history of the still-young field of artificial intelligence. It was incredibly ambitious, and the result was a superb work of scholarship. She updated that book, Machines Who Think, twenty-five years later, and declared then that she wouldn't write another volume on the subject. Fortunately for all of us, she went back on that vow. "A history exists of all this, a human story about the invention of artificial intelligence by a handful of brilliant scientists," she writes in This Could Be Important, which went on sale last month (Carnegie Mellon Press).