Artificial Intelligence for Business

CHAPTER 2Ideation

An Artificial Intelligence Primer

The evolution of digital computers can be traced all the way back to the 1800s. The 1800s were an era of steam engines and large mechanical machines. It was during this era that Charles Babbage drew up the notes for making a difference engine.¹ The difference engine was an automatic calculator that worked on the principle of second-order derivatives to calculate a series of values from a given equation. This breakthrough paved the way for modern computers. After the invention of the difference engine, Babbage turned his attention to solving more equations and giving a programming ability to his machines. His new machine was called the analytical engine.

Another key figure in this era of computing was Ada Lovelace. She prepared extensive notes to aid in the understanding and generalization of the analytical engine.² For her contributions, she is generally considered to be the world's first programmer. Although she erroneously rejected that computers were capable of creative and decision-making processes, she was the first to correctly note that computers could be the generalized data processing machines we see today.

Alan Turing, in his seminal paper introducing the Turing test,³ met Lovelace's objections head on, saying that the analytical engine had the property of being “Turing complete” similar to programming language today and that with sufficient storage and time, it could be programmed to complete the Turing test. Turing ...