Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing: Behavioral ... - Arteimi.info

control has been successfully used in many industrial plants. One typical
application is the power control in a nuclear reactor. Besides design of the
controller, the other issue in process control is to design a plant (process)
estimator, which attempts to follow the response of the actual plant, when
both the plant and the estimator are jointly excited by a common input signal.
The fuzzy and artificial neural network-based learning techniques have recently
been identified as new tools for plant estimation [25], [43].
1.5 A Brief History of AI
Professor Peter Jackson of the University of Edinburgh classified the history
of AI into three periods namely i) the classical period (of game playing and
theorem proving), ii) the romantic period, and iii) the modern period [12]; the
major research work carried out during these periods is presented below.
1.5.1 The Classical Period
This period dates back to 1950. The main research works carried out during
this period include game playing and theorem proving. The concept of statespace
approach for solving a problem, which is a useful tool for intelligent
problem-solving even now, was originated during this period [27].
The period of classical AI research began with the publication of
Shannon’s paper on chess (1950) [35] and ended with the publication by
Feigenbaum and Feldman [10]. The major area of research covered under this
period is intelligent search problems involved in game-playing and theoremproving.
Turing’s “test”, which is a useful tool to test machine intelligence,
originated during this period.
1.5.2 The Romantic Period
The romantic period started from the mid 1960s and continued until the mid
1970s. During this period, people were interested in making machines
“understand”, by which they usually mean the understanding of natural
languages. Winograd’s (1972) SHRDLU system [46], a program capable of
understanding a non-trivial subset of English by representing and reasoning
about a restricted domain (a world consisting of toy blocks), in this regard
needs special mention. The knowledge representation scheme using special
structures like “semantic nets” was originated by Quillian [33] during this
period. Minisky (1968) also made a great contribution from the point of view
of information processing using semantic nets. Further, knowledge