Some elements for a prehistory of artificial intelligence in the last four centuries

© 2014 The Authors and IOS Press. Artificial intelligence (AI) was not born ex nihilo in the mid-fifties of the XXth century. Beyond its immediate roots in cybernetics and in computer science that started about two decades before, its emergence is the result of a long and slow process in the history of humanity. This can be articulated around two main questions: the formalization of reasoning and the design of machines having autonomous capabilities in terms of computation and action. The aim of this paper is to gather some insufficiently known elements about the prehistory of AI in the last 350 years that precede the official birth of AI, a time period where only a few very well-known names, such as Thomas Bayes and Georges Boole, are usually mentioned in relation with AI.