Intelligent Decision Support Methods

The effort to create machines with some sort of intelligence began almost 100 years ago with the ideas of Babbage (1884) as shown in Figure 1. In 1950, Alan Turin, the “father of Artificial Intelligence” (Barr and Feigenbaum, 1981), presented the famous Turing test, which gives an answer to the question if a machine is able to think as a human being (Rich, 1983). Turing not only developed a simple, general and non-arithmetic computational model, but he also supported that computational models could possibly behave with a way that could be deemed “intelligent”. In 1950, Shannon supported that someone could play a game of chess with the help of computer and in 1955 he proved his idea by developing a chess program while, later Samuel (1963) developed a checkers program. Wiener (1948), founder of cybernetics, contributed by recognizing the similarities in functions of humans and machines. In overall, the actual goal of this effort was to understand and find a solution on how to embody in a computer the ability of human beings to think and rationalize (Durkin, 1994). The term “Artificial Intelligence” was used for the first time by John McCarthy (1963; 1969; 1977; 1980; 1995) during a conference held in Dartmouth College (1956).