ABSTRACT
Artificial intelligence was born in the late fifties. It had two main goals: (1) a scientific goal which consisted in trying to understand how humans reason; (2) an engineering goal which consisted in designing and building “intelligent” machines. Which goal was promoted depended on whom you were talking to. In 1963 Feigenbaum and Feldman (1963) wrote: “The purpose of this volume is to inform the non specialist about current research on intelligent behavior by computer.” They added in the introduction, three main objectives for artificial intelligence: (1) learning heuristic methods and rules; (2) inductive inference (modeling the world and pattern recognition); and (3) understanding natural language. Thirty years later, Davis and coworkers (1993) have classified the various approaches used in artificial intelligence in broad categories according to their intellectual origins: (1) psychology; (2) biology; (3) statistics; and (4) economics. In between, artificial intelligence experienced successes and failures, was praised and despised, but developed numerous original hardware and software techniques which today are widely used in everyday computing.
