Programs that learn from their experience as effectively as humans do
1959 (Mechanisation of Thought Processes, Her Majesty's Stationery Office). John McCarthy, then at MIT and coiner of the term artificial intelligence, proposed the advice taker program in this paper for the Teddington symposium on the mechanisation of thought processes, November 1958, published 1959
More from John McCarthy · AI and science · Before ChatGPT
Who else?
What it refers to: The ultimate objective behind the advice taker, set against Samuel's checker program, which learns only simple changes anticipated by the programmer.
Other voices
- “A machine that can learn from experience” Alan Turing, Researcher,
- “A computer can be programmed so that it will learn” Arthur L. Samuel,
- “Belongs in the Journal of Half-Baked Ideas” Yehoshua Bar-Hillel,
- “The machine will not learn by mistakes” Claude Shannon,
- “The whole AI research program was degenerating” Hubert L. Dreyfus,
- “Intelligence is largely defined by experience and training” Jeff Hawkins,










