A History Of Artificial Intelligence -- From the Beginning

In the seminal paper on AI, titled Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing famously asked: "Can machines think?" -- or, more accurately, can machines successfully imitate thought? Turing clarifies that he's interested in machines that "are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer." In other words, he's interested in complex digital machines. Since the achievement of a thinking digital machine is a matter of the evolution of machines, it reasons to start at the beginning of machine history. A machine is a device that does work.