The Mechanical Turk, an eighteenth-century chess-playing "automaton", turned out to be what?

A cabinet concealing a human player

A clockwork device that played legal but weak moves

An empty box with no mechanism at all

ELIZA, written in the 1960s, imitated what?

A psychotherapist reflecting statements back at the user

A telephone switchboard operator

A librarian answering reference queries

Expert systems, widely built in the 1980s, worked mainly by what means?

Applying hand-written rules gathered from specialists

Finding statistical patterns in very large datasets

Simulating a complete human brain

Searching the open internet for answers

The 1997 chess match between Garry Kasparov and IBM's Deep Blue ended how?

The match was abandoned unfinished

What is meant by an "AI winter"?

A period in which funding and interest collapsed

A shutdown of machines to save power

A ban on exporting certain software

The season when data centres run most efficiently

Moravec's paradox observes that which tasks are hardest to automate?

The perceptual and physical skills people find effortless

Storing and retrieving large amounts of text

Norbert Wiener's 1948 book Cybernetics concerned what?

Control and communication in animals and machines

The design of the first stored-program computer

A universal notation for scientific writing

The mathematics of prime numbers

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Robotics & AI Hard ⚡ 10 Questions ⏱️ ~8 Mins +100 XP

The Long Road to Artificial Intelligence

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The field is much older than the hardware. These are the people, machines and objections that shaped it.

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~8m

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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.

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The Long Road to Artificial Intelligence: all 10 questions and answers

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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

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