Becoming Cognitive

Cognitive computing is an outgrowth of artificial intelligence (AI), which originally set out to make computers more useful and more capable of independent reasoning. But where did AI come from? The field has a long history rooted in military science and statistics, with contributions from philosophy, psychology, math and cognitive science. Most historians trace the birth of AI to a Dartmouth research project in 1956 that explored topics like problem solving and symbolic methods. In the 1960s, the US Department of Defense took interest in this type of work and increased the focus on training computers to mimic human reasoning.