BROADCASTS.com

Creating a machine that thinks may have seemed like science fiction in the 1950s. But John McCarthy decided to make it a reality. And he started with a language he called LISP. Colin Garvey describes how McCarthy created the first language for AI. Sam Williams covers how early interest in thinking machines spread from academia to the business world, and how\u2014after certain projects didn\u2019t deliver on their promises\u2014a long AI winter eventually set in. Ulrich Drepper explains that the dreams of AI went beyond what the hardware could deliver at the time.\n\nBut hardware gets more powerful each and every day. Chris Nicholson points out that today\u2019s machines have enough processing power to handle the resource requirements of AI\u2014so much so that we\u2019re in the middle of a revolutionary resurgence in AI research and development. Finally, Rachel Thomas identifies the languages of AI beyond LISP\u2014evidence of the different kinds of tasks AI is now being prepared to do.