artificial intelligence - The science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by [people] (Minsky, 1968). See connectionism, symbolicism.
More precisely, the branch of computer science which attempts to simulate human cognition by means of machines.
The birth of AI was at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence organized by John McCarthy in 1956. However, researchers had been working on problems related to machine intelligence decades earlier (e.g. Turing). The early years of AI were dependent on symbolic models of cognitive processing which are formally equivalent to the Turing machine and thus algorithmically calculable. The Physical Systems Symbol Hypothesis of Newell and Simon formalized the commitments of this sort of approach to machine intelligence.
[Introduction to AI] [See also Cogsci Dictionary] [Foundational Questions in AI]
Minsky, M.L., ed. (1968). Semantic information processing. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press. [bookstore]
Newell, A (1990) Unified theories of cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [bookstore]
Turing, A.M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind. 59: 433-460.
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