History of Logic Seminar Series - Talk: Donald Gillies, "Mathematical Logic and the Birth of AI" (15.01.2026)
antpic...@gmail.com
Happy New Year!
We are pleased to announce the third session of the second annual cycle of the History of Logic Seminar Series. The session will be held on Thursday, January 15, from 3 to 5 p.m. CET.
We will meet via Zoom. You can receive the Zoom link by subscribing to our mailing list. Please, write to historyofl...@gmail.com.
On this occasion, we will host a talk by Donald Gillies (University College London). His talk is titled Mathematical Logic and the Birth of AI. Here is a short abstract:
The birth of AI is often considered to have taken place at a summer school held in Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1956. Pursuing the analogy with human reproduction, we could say that two parents needed to come together and this to be followed by a period of gestation. In the case of AI, the two parents were Mathematical Logic and Neuroscience. They came together in a paper published in 1943, and this was followed by a gestation period consisting of philosophical reflection, mainly by Turing, on the possibility of AI and how it might be achieved, and of isolated attempts to solve what are now considered to be AI problems. In the paper, I will describe these developments and show how they led to two approaches to AI – the logic-based approach and the neural networks approach. I will then go on to describe developments in the logic-based approach from 1956 to 1973. In 1973, as a result of criticisms of AI, much funding for the research in the subject was cut off, and the first ‘AI winter’ set in.
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Kind regards,
Antonio