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The Long Road to Artificial Intelligence
The field is much older than the hardware. These are the people, machines and objections that shaped it.
About this topic
Artificial intelligence has been declared imminent roughly once a generation since the 1950s, and each wave has left something behind: a technique, a benchmark, or a good objection. The pattern is consistent enough to be worth knowing. A method works impressively on a narrow problem, funding follows, the method fails to generalise, funding collapses, and the useful residue is quietly absorbed into ordinary software. This quiz stays on the durable parts of that story — the Dartmouth meeting that named the field, the perceptron, the expert systems boom, the philosophical arguments that will still be arguments in fifty years. It deliberately avoids naming current systems, because those date faster than anything else in the subject.
Questions & answers
The Long Road to Artificial Intelligence: all 10 questions and answers
Every question in this quiz is listed below with its correct answer and the reasoning behind it. Play first if you would rather not see the answers — or read through as a study sheet.
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1Who is usually credited with publishing the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine?
- A Emmy Noether
- B Ada Lovelace Correct
- C Mary Somerville
- D Grace Hopper
Answer: B. Ada Lovelace
Why: Her 1843 notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine set out how it might compute Bernoulli numbers. She also argued the machine could in principle work on things other than numbers, such as music.
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2The term "artificial intelligence" was coined for a 1956 summer workshop held at which institution?
- A Dartmouth College Correct
- B MIT
- C Stanford University
- D Bell Labs
Answer: A. Dartmouth College
Why: John McCarthy proposed the phrase in the funding application. The field's long habit of underestimating timescales dates from the same gathering.
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3The Mechanical Turk, an eighteenth-century chess-playing "automaton", turned out to be what?
- A A clockwork device that played legal but weak moves
- B An empty box with no mechanism at all
- C A very early analogue computer
- D A cabinet concealing a human player Correct
Answer: D. A cabinet concealing a human player
Why: Wolfgang von Kempelen built it in 1770 and it toured for decades. The trick held because the cabinet doors were opened in sequence rather than all at once.
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4ELIZA, written in the 1960s, imitated what?
- A A telephone switchboard operator
- B A librarian answering reference queries
- C A psychotherapist reflecting statements back at the user Correct
- D A chess grandmaster
Answer: C. A psychotherapist reflecting statements back at the user
Why: Joseph Weizenbaum built it from simple pattern matching, with no model of the conversation at all. He was disturbed by how readily people confided in it anyway.
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5The perceptron, described in 1958, was an early version of what?
- A A robotic gripper
- B An artificial neuron Correct
- C A hard disk
- D A compiler
Answer: B. An artificial neuron
Why: Frank Rosenblatt's machine learned to classify simple patterns by adjusting weights. A 1969 book setting out its limits helped stall neural network research for years.
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6Expert systems, widely built in the 1980s, worked mainly by what means?
- A Applying hand-written rules gathered from specialists Correct
- B Finding statistical patterns in very large datasets
- C Simulating a complete human brain
- D Searching the open internet for answers
Answer: A. Applying hand-written rules gathered from specialists
Why: Knowledge had to be extracted from people and written as if-then rules, which made the systems brittle the moment a case fell outside their domain. Their commercial disappointment fed the funding slump that followed.
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7The 1997 chess match between Garry Kasparov and IBM's Deep Blue ended how?
- A The human won the match
- B Every game was drawn
- C The match was abandoned unfinished
- D The machine won the match Correct
Answer: D. The machine won the match
Why: Deep Blue worked by searching enormous numbers of positions rather than by anything resembling intuition. Kasparov had beaten an earlier version of it the previous year.
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8What is meant by an "AI winter"?
- A A ban on exporting certain software
- B The season when data centres run most efficiently
- C A period in which funding and interest collapsed Correct
- D A shutdown of machines to save power
Answer: C. A period in which funding and interest collapsed
Why: There were at least two, in the mid-1970s and the late 1980s. Each followed a stretch of promises that the available computing power could not meet.
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9Moravec's paradox observes that which tasks are hardest to automate?
- A Storing and retrieving large amounts of text
- B The perceptual and physical skills people find effortless Correct
- C Abstract mathematics
- D Board games with fixed rules
Answer: B. The perceptual and physical skills people find effortless
Why: Reasoning tasks fell to computers decades before reliable grasping and walking did. The skills we share with other animals are the oldest and the hardest to reproduce.
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10Norbert Wiener's 1948 book Cybernetics concerned what?
- A Control and communication in animals and machines Correct
- B The design of the first stored-program computer
- C A universal notation for scientific writing
- D The mathematics of prime numbers
Answer: A. Control and communication in animals and machines
Why: The word comes from the Greek for steersman, and feedback is its central idea. The field fed straight into control engineering and, later, into robotics.
Frequently asked questions about The Long Road to Artificial Intelligence
How many questions are in The Long Road to Artificial Intelligence?
The Long Road to Artificial Intelligence has 10 questions and takes about 8 minutes to finish. It is rated Hard and sits in our Robotics & AI category.
How is The Long Road to Artificial Intelligence scored?
Each of the 10 correct answers adds 10 XP, up to 100 XP for a clean run. Wrong answers cost you nothing, and your full question-by-question review is shown at the end.
Are the answers to The Long Road to Artificial Intelligence explained?
Yes. All 10 questions carry a written explanation of why the correct answer is right, so the quiz works as a study sheet as well as a test.
Can I replay The Long Road to Artificial Intelligence?
Yes, as often as you like. The questions and the answer options are reshuffled on each run, and you can use Practice Mistakes afterwards to retry only the ones you missed. No account is needed to play.
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