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Since ancient times, humans have innovated machines to make life easier. However,
they reached a stage where machines needed brains to perform tasks, sparking a
revolutionary idea for thinking machines. Let us look at some of the achievements of

the last century.

Developments in AI

The journey to understand if machines could truly think began before John McCarthy’s
first academic conference. Five years earlier, Alan Turing wrote a paper on the notion
of machines being able to simulate human beings and the ability to do intelligent

things, such as playing chess. Let us take a look at some of the milestones in the
previous century.

1950–1960

In this decade, two major contributions were observed. In 1950, Alan Turing
submitted a paper about the possibility of creating a machine that could think. This

became a test for machines to check the thinking capability of a machine. One of the
greatest achievements of Alan Turing is the creation of The Bombe, a machine that
could decode the encoded messages.

The Bombe was a code-breaking machine that was developed to decode encrypted
codes from German Enigma machines during World War II.

AI Timeline 77