Artificial Intelligence :: Exploratory Essays Research Papers

Artificial Intelligence "My name is Dorothy," said the girl, "and I am going to the Emerald City, to ask the Oz to send me back to Kansas."   "Where is the Emerald City?" he enquired; "and who is Oz?"   "Why, don't you know?" she returned in surprise.   "No, indeed; I don't know anything. You see, I am stuffed, so I have no brains at all," he answered, sadly.   "Oh," said Dorothy; "I'm awfully sorry for you."   "Do you think," he asked, "If I go to the Emerald City with you, that the great Oz would give me some brains?"   "I cannot tell you," she returned; "but you may come with me, if you like. If Oz will not give you any brains you will be no worse off than you are now."   -L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful World of Oz1 As Dorothy and the Scarecrow begin their search for a "brain," we can catch a glimpse of an issue that has been bouncing around our culture for centuries: can man make a machine think? While Baum's story does not focus on the Scarecrow as the possibility of a thinking machine, he does raise the question of whether a human brain is necessary for thinking. This question of the brainÕs vitality is first exposed to our culture with what many literary critics feel is the birth of Science Fiction, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.  Ã‚   Frankenstein is the story of dead body parts being brought to life through the use of electricity. After witnessing the creature's action readers are left asking if the human brain is sufficient for thinking or if there is more to thinking than a brain? Other Science Fiction writers took this to a different level and "created" the robot, a non-human thinking machine. Frankenstein is on the cusp of humans and non-humans and the beginning of the debate of what it means to artificially think. These imagined ideas caused others to think about making these ideas a reality. Marvin Minsky, one of the original scientists involved in establishing artificial intelligence, cites Science Fiction as one of his major motivators to enter the world of AI. It was not until the summer of 1956 that scientists felt that it might be possible to write non-fiction accounts of robots at some point in the near future.  Ã‚   During the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College, scholars, who would later be considered the founding fathers of