The potential power of artificial intelligence (AI) has been touted for more than 60 years though a generally accepted definition is elusive. AI has often been defined in terms of human-like capabilities. In 1960, for example, AI pioneer Herbert Simon, an economics Nobel laureate and Turing Award winner, predicted that "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do." In 1970 Marvin Minsky, also a Turing Award winner, said that, "In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being." More recently, in 2015, Mark Zuckerberg said that, "One of our goals for the next five to 10 years is to basically get better than human level at all of the primary human senses: vision, hearing, language, general cognition."

The potential power of artificial intelligence (AI) has been touted for … with male and female subjects, the computer is deemed intelligent.

Since the revolutionary invention of computers, scientists and engineers have been posing the question, " Can intelligence be artificially created? " These questions led to the birth of the field of Artificial Intelligence. Coined in 1956, AI has become one of the hottest technologies around. In this series we are going to dive deep into everything that this field has to offer and more. Intelligence is the by-product of accumulated knowledge, experience and the ability to infer reasoning from these acquired knowledge and finally apply these reasoning into action and adapt with the environment surrounding the intelligent entity.

We have briefly discussed the Turing Test approach in one of our previous posts. It gave an understanding of the Four Main Approaches to Artificial Intelligence. Also, we have gone through in detail "Thinking Humanly: The cognitive modeling approach" and saw how to make an AI model think like a human. The first thing that comes to our mind when building a robot is whether it can act like a human. In 1950, Alan Turing's famous paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" suggested that instead of asking if machines can think, we should ask if machines can pass a behavioral intelligent test.