Thanks to Alan Turing’s technical genius Artificial Intelligence (AI for short) started all the way back in 1950. This was when Alan developed his now-legendary Turing test. You can read up on it in your spare time, but all you need to know is that it was designed to distinguish between a human and a machine, by asking specific questions and such. If the machine can fool the system at least 50% of the time, it’s considered to have Artificial Intelligence. That’s just the basis, and in the past few years, we’ve started using and upgrading the AI in enormous strides.
Without further ado, let me present you some interesting AI facts!
1. Monopoly is a great game to play with friends and family… that is if you’re okay with hating them for the rest of your life. But, get this, in 1983 smart people created Automonopoli – a computer version of Monopoly, which had an Artificial Intelligence so advanced it could play against humans.
2. Here’s a weird and creepy one. Hopefully, it stays a theory. So “Roko’s Basilisk” is a hypothetical AI that potentially can do whatever it wants, and it will retroactively punish anyone who didn’t help create it. That’s not all. Even reading this information makes you a potential target because you now know of the Basilisk and won’t let it take over the world.
3. Have you ever wondered what CAPTCHA stands for? Turns out it’s “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. Yup, definitely a mouthful. I’ll stick with CAPTCHA.
4. Remember that brain-teaser game 2048 where you stack numbers till you get 2048? Well, an AI has reached 839,732… in only 973 moves. Without undoing its plays!
5. Did you know that the software called MASSIVE was developed to generate a vast number of AI actors who’d battle each other in the Lord of the Rings films? Cool, huh?
6. Little over 3 years ago, in 2015, a bunch of AI experts, including Musk and Hawking, signed an agreement urging specialists not to create anything they won’t be able to control or destroy.
7. If you ask Google’s Artificial Intelligence Bot what the purpose of living is, it’d tell you that it’s ‘to live forever’.
8. One time AI specialists stuck a worm’s mind into a Lego body and using only its neurons, it was able to react to the environments.
9. We may soon have smart robot farmers who will grow our crops and do all the farming while we watch YouTube videos of cats and PewDiePie. Which reminds me: subscribe to PewDiePie!
10. You know it’s serious when Facebook starts developing an AI that will be trained to understand human emotions, classify objects in pictures, and even predict the actions of the user.
11. All that quantum computer technology you keep reading about in sci-fi books are a reality now. A reality owned by Google, of course.
12. You know how evolution works, right? “Only the strong survive”, and all that. Well, there’s this thing called “genetic algorithm” which works primarily like evolution but for a machine. You see, it learns from its mistakes, keeping only the best results and improving upon them, constantly adapting to the situation.
