Week 1. Introduction

Some three thousand years ago in China, the strategic board game Go was developed. Some believe warlords and generals based it on the stones they'd place on maps to determine their battle plans. Besides being the oldest continually played board game in human history, it's also one of the most complex.

In modern times, beating this game became known in the artificial intelligence community as the holy grail. Since the number of possible configurations on the board is larger than the number of atoms in the universe, it was believed computers didn't have the processing power needed to beat a skilled human player.

In move 37 of the second match, the machine was faced with a decision that would determine the way the rest of the game would be played. There were two apparent choices to be made. Choice A was the kind of move that would signal the computer was playing a game of offense. Choice B would signal it was playing a defensive game.

Instead, the computer decided to make a third move, a move no one steeped in the game had ever made in thousands of years of play. "Not a single human player would choose move 37," one commentator said. Most thought it was a mistake or simply a bad move.

The grandmaster playing against the machine was so taken aback, he stood up and walked out of the room. He eventually returned, not with his usual confident composure but visibly shaken and frustrated by the experience. In the end, AlphaGo won the game. And that never-been-seen-before move, experts said, was the one that turned the course of the game in favor of the Al. In the end, the computer won four out of five matches, and the grandmaster [Lee Sedol] permanently retired from competition.

I think, therefore I am.

cogito ergo sum

René Descartes (1596-1650)

Descartes wondered if he could know for sure that others
who looked and behaved like him were not in fact automata.

This was a serious practical issue back in the 17th century!

The Imitation Game was a party game where two people would go off to different rooms in the house and other people at the party would interact with them by sending them questions to answer.

 The people who are hidden away in the other rooms would type back their answers and the other players would have to guess just based on these typewritten responses, who was who.

 They argued that neural computations explain cognition.

 The theory was proposed in its modern form by Hilary Putnam in 1967, and developed by his PhD student, philosopher, and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

 It was vigorously disputed in analytic philosophy in the 1990s due to work by Putnam himself, John Searle, and others.

narrow/weak artificial intelligence
Limited to a single, narrowly defined task.
Most modern AI systems would be classified in this category.

artificial general intelligence (AGI)
A machine with the ability to apply at least human-level intelligence to any problem, rather than just one specific problem as with narrow AI.

artificial superintelligence (ASI)
A machine with a vastly superior intelligence to the average human being.

artificial consciousness
A machine that has consciousness, sentience and mind
(John Searle uses "strong AI" in this sense).

J. Offray de la Mettrie · Machine Man (1747)

René Descartes · Treatise of Man (1633)

The Sandman (short story) · E. T. A. Hoffmann (1816)

R.U.R. (play) · Karel Čapek (1920)

Gödel, Escher, Bach · Douglas Hofstadter (1979)

Where Am I? (short story) · Daniel Dennett (1978)

Thomas Hobbes · Leviathan (1651)

What Is ChatGPT Doing... and Why Does It Work? · Stephen Wolfram (2023)

Philosophy

Mathematics

Economics

Neuroscience

Psychology

Computer engineering

Control theory and cybernetics