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What AI Is: fun facts and quiz
The essentials in 7 ideas, with fun facts, an illustrated story and a quiz to see how much you know.
The essentials
What AI Is
Artificial intelligence is software that does things we’d normally call smart: recognising faces, translating languages or answering questions.
Key fact
The term “artificial intelligence” was coined for a 1956 workshop.
AI Around You
You probably use AI every day: in spam filters, map routes, photo search, streaming recommendations and voice assistants.
Key fact
Photo apps can find every picture of a dog or a beach in seconds.
Narrow vs General AI
Most AI is narrow, built for specific tasks like playing chess or spotting tumours in scans. General AI, able to learn anything a person can, remains a goal researchers debate.
Key fact
A chess-playing AI can’t drive a car.
The Turing Test
In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a test: if a person chatting by text can’t tell a machine from a human, the machine passes.
Key fact
Turing called it “the imitation game”.
Machine Learning
Machine learning means learning from examples instead of following hand-written rules. Show a system thousands of labelled photos and it learns to spot cats itself.
Key fact
More good examples usually mean better results.
AI Milestones
In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue beat chess champion Garry Kasparov. In 2016, DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol at Go, a far more complex game.
Key fact
Go has more possible positions than atoms in the observable universe.
Generative AI
Generative AI creates new text, images, music or code from a prompt. Chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude run on large language models trained on huge amounts of text.
Key fact
Generative AI can sound confident and still be wrong, so check facts.
Fun facts
The organisers of the 1956 workshop that named AI hoped to make real progress on it in a single summer.
Email spam filters were one of the first everyday uses of machine learning, from around 2000.
AlphaZero taught itself chess, Go and shogi, but it still needed training from scratch for each game.
In 1966, a simple chatbot called ELIZA convinced some users it understood them, using only clever tricks.
Arthur Samuel coined the term “machine learning” in 1959, for a program that learned to play draughts.
In 2019, an AI called Pluribus beat top professionals at six-player poker, a game full of bluffing and hidden cards.
Early chatbots followed hand-written scripts; today’s learn language from examples.
Story: The Move That Rattled a Champion
The Move That Rattled a Champion
May 1997. World chess champion Garry Kasparov faces IBM’s computer, Deep Blue. Late in the first game, it plays a baffling move.
Kasparov wins, but the move haunts him: can the machine see far deeper than he thought? He loses the next game and hints at cheating.
Deep Blue won the match. Years later, one of its designers said the strange move was a bug: stuck, it had picked a move at random.
True or false?
Tap your answer to see if you got it, and why.
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Question 1 of 10
AI is software that can do tasks we usually link to human intelligence.
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True. Like recognising speech, translating or playing games.
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Question 2 of 10
Streaming services use AI to recommend what to watch.
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True. They learn from what you and similar viewers watch.
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Question 3 of 10
A chess-playing AI can also drive a car.
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False. Narrow AI only does the task it was built for.
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Question 4 of 10
Alan Turing proposed his famous test in 1950.
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True. In his paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”.
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Question 5 of 10
Machine learning systems learn patterns from data.
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True. The patterns come from examples, not hand-written rules.
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Question 6 of 10
AlphaGo beat a top Go champion.
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True. Lee Sedol, in 2016.
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Question 7 of 10
Generative AI can write computer code.
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True. From a plain-language request.
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Question 8 of 10
The idea of AI was invented in the 2010s.
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False. The field was founded in the 1950s.
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Question 9 of 10
AI is only found in robots.
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False. Most AI runs quietly inside apps and websites.
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Question 10 of 10
Most AI systems are built for specific tasks.
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True. Recognising speech, recommending films, spotting fraud…
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KnowSoda learns what you know and brings back what you’re about to forget. What AI Is has 6 more ideas at the Advanced and Expert levels.
Sources
- McCarthy et al. (1955), Dartmouth Summer Research Project on AI proposal
- Turing (1950), “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, Mind 59
- IBM — Deep Blue
- Google DeepMind — AlphaGo
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — artificial intelligence, machine learning
- The Nobel Prize — Chemistry 2024 (protein structure prediction)
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — The Chinese Room argument
- IBM — Watson and Jeopardy!
