The idea of AI, entailing machine that can think without human help, is surprisingly old. It can be dated back to the Indian philosophies of Charvaka, from around 1,500 BC.
The basis of AI is the philosophical concept that human reasoning can be mapped into a mechanical process. We can find this process in many civilizations in the first millennium BC, in particular in Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Euclid.
Philosophers and mathematicians, such as Leibniz and Hobbes, in the 17th century explored the possibility that all of a human being's rational thoughts could be mapped into an algebraic or geometric system.
Only at the beginning of the 20th century was the limits defined of what mathematics and logic can accomplish and how far mathematical reasoning can be abstracted. It was at that time that the mathematician Alan Turing defined the Turing machine...
