Arguing A.I.: The Battle for Twenty-first-Century Science

At the height of the Second International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris in August 1900, German mathematician David Hilbert offered a poetic introduction to what would later be known as his "Twenty-three Problems" lecture, a milestone speech many mathematical historians credit for laying the foundation of twentieth-century mathematics [http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/hilbert/problems.html]. "Who among us would not be glad to lift the veil behind which the future lies hidden, to cast a glance at the next advances of our science and the secrets of its development in future centuries"? he asked.

A hundred years later, Hilbert's words offer a poetic introduction to the history of artificial intelligence as well. Artificial intelligence is, after all, a science inextricably linked to the future. Read any book on A.I. and it's easy to detect a similar desire to bear witness to the future. The desire to "lift the veil" separating today's earnest investigation from tomorrow's common knowledge is as strong for A.I. researchers as it was for Hilbert and his colleagues a century ago.

The similarity is a familial one. Although the science of artificial intelligence as we now know it didn't emerge until a full decade after Hilbert's death in 1943, many of the theories that gave rise to that science descend directly from ideas posed by Hilbert at that fateful Paris lecture. The same goes for the spirit of artificial intelligence. Conceived in the collaborative science projects of World War II and nurtured in the postwar era of big science, A.I., too, draws its heritage from the post-Paris "program" created by Hilbert and his disciples at Germany's Gottingen University in the decades prior to the Nazi seizure of power.

"Hilbert was a giant among mathematicians," writes mathematical historian Mary Tiles in Mathematics and the Image of Reason. "It is hard to overestimate his influence over the character of twentieth century mathematics; so many of the great names in mathematics worked under him or worked with him."

Hilbert was born in 1862 and raised in the East Prussian city of Konigsberg. Now the Russian city of Kaliningrad, Konigsberg in the nineteenth century was best known as the home of the eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant. Growing up in Kant?s prodigious intellectual wake, Hilbert developed an early affinity for numbers and logic that would prompt him to pursue a career in mathematics, much to the consternation of his father, Otto Hilbert, a Prussian judge.