Those who have never studied the artificial intelligence domain and have learned
about its existence from media will be surprised that this concept, despite its present popularity, is more than 70 years old. It is generally understood that everything presently associated with artificial intelligence originated with the British
mathematician and cryptologist Alan Turing, author of the famous test which,
if passed, allowed calling a machine “intelligent”. Today, Turing is regarded as
the creator of artificial intelligence and contemporary information technology. To
show appreciation for his scientific merits both to the world and the UK, the Bank
of England has announced that Turing’s image will be the face of a new GBP
50 banknote, which came into circulation in June 2021. Although a lot of theoretical and methodological solutions applied in artificial intelligence date back to
distant times, a question arises as to why this field has become so popular today
and why humanity attaches such great importance to it. The answer to this question, contrary to expectations, turns out to be quite simple, as important progress
has been made over the last decade in computational power (see Tables 2.1 and
2.3), access to data and the scale of their growth currently counted in dozens of
zettabytes (see Figure 4.4), as well as in the development of algorithmics. As a
consequence, newly created evolutionary algorithms, error backpropagation algorithms, quantum algorithms or predictive algorithms are presently broadly applied
in wide-ranging domains of life, from medicine, education, through science,
industry, power generation, transport, mass media, administration, management,
safety, business services, to agriculture, the natural environment or mining and
fishery. In other words, elements of artificial intelligence have been permanently
introduced into our lives, changing them in previously unknown and revolutionary ways.