2006: Celebrating 75 Years of AI - History and Outlook: The Next 25 Years

When Kurt Gödel layed the foundations of theoretical computer science in 1931, he also introduced essential concepts of the theory of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Although much of subsequent AI research has focused on heuristics, which still play a major role in many practical AI applications, in the new millennium AI theory has finally become a full-fledged formal science, with important optimality results for embodied agents living in unknown environments, obtained through a combination of theory à la Gödel and probability theory. Here we look back at important milestones of AI history, mention essential recent results, and speculate about what we may expect from the next 25 years, emphasizing the significance of the ongoing dramatic hardware speedups, and discussing Gödel-inspired, selfreferential, self-improving universal problem solvers. 1 Highlights of AI History—From Gödel to 2006 Gödel and Lilienfeld. In 1931, 75 years ago and just a few years after Julius Lilienfeld patented the transistor, Kurt Gödel layed the foundations of theoretical computer science (CS) with his work on universal formal languages and the limits of proof and computation [5]. He constructed formal systems allowing for self-referential statements that talk about themselves, in particular, about whether they can be derived from a set of given axioms through a computational theorem proving procedure. Gödel went on to construct statements that claim their own unprovability, to demonstrate that traditional math is either flawed in a certain algorithmic sense or contains unprovable but true statements. Gödel’s incompleteness result is widely regarded as the most remarkable achievement of 20th century mathematics, although some mathematicians say it is logic, not math, and others call it the fundamental result of theoretical computer science, a discipline that did not yet officially exist back then but was effectively created through Invited contribution to the Proceedings of the “50th Anniversary Summit of Artificial Intelligence” at Monte Verita, Ascona, Switzerland, 9-14 July 2006 (variant accepted for Springer’s LNAI series)