Leader in artificial intelligence dies

Though London-born, he did his most significant work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was among the organisers of the Dartmouth Conference of 1956 at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. The first public meeting on artificial intelligence, it introduced the term into general use.

The idea of artificial intelligence, that a mechanical ''brain'' might some day be capable of ''learning'' from its experiences and evolving into a superior form, has been regarded by some as the Holy Grail of computer science, though in Hollywood it is more often portrayed as its nemesis. It was only with the invention of the programmable digital computer in the 1940s that it became practicable to postulate how such a machine might be designed, and the ways in which its intelligence could be assessed.

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