自然段A

After years in the wilderness, the term ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) seems poised to make a comeback. AI was big in the 1980s but vanished in the 1990s. It re-entered public consciousness with the release of AI, a movie about a robot boy. This has ignited public debate about AI, but the term is also being used once more within the computer industry. Researchers, executives and marketing people are now using the expression without irony or inverted commas. And it is not always hype. The term is being applied, with some justification, to products that depend on technology that was originally developed by AI researchers. Admittedly, the rehabilitation of the term has a long way to go, and some firms still prefer to avoid using it. But the fact that others are starting to use it again suggests that AI has moved on from being seen as an over-ambitious and under-achieving field of research.

    自然段A

经过多年的沉寂，人工智能（AI）这个词似乎正准备再次回归。AI在20世纪80年代很火，但在90年代消失了。随着电影《人工智能》的发布，它再次进入公众意识中。这引发了关于AI的公众讨论，但该术语也再次在计算机行业中被使用。研究人员、高管和市场人员现在毫不含糊地使用这个表达，而且并非总是夸大其词。人们正在将这个术语应用于那些依赖于最初由AI研究人员开发的技术的产品上，并且这样做是有一定合理性的。诚然，这个术语的恢复还有很长的路要走，一些公司仍然不愿使用它。但其他公司开始重新使用它这个事实表明，AI已经超越了被视为过度雄心勃勃、成就不佳的研究领域的阶段。

自然段B

The field was launched, and the term ‘artificial intelligence’ coined, at a conference in 1956 by a group of researchers that included Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Herbert Simon and Alan Newell, all of whom went on to become leading figures in the field. The expression provided an attractive but informative name for a research programme that encompassed such previously disparate fields as operations research, cybernetics, logic and computer science. The goal they shared was an attempt to capture or mimic human abilities using machines. That said, different groups of researchers attacked different problems, from speech recognition to chess playing, in different ways; AI unified the field in name only. But it was a term that captured the public imagination.

自然段B

这个领域于1956年在一个由马文·明斯基（Marvin Minsky）、约翰·麦卡锡（John McCarthy）、赫伯特·西蒙（Herbert Simon）和艾伦·纽厄尔（Alan Newell）等研究人员组成的团队组织的一次会议中启动，同时也创造了“人工智能”这个术语。这个表达提供了一个既有吸引力又具有信息性的名字，它涵盖了诸如运筹学、控制论、逻辑和计算机科学等此前不同的领域。他们共同的目标是试图使用机器来捕捉或模拟人类的能力。尽管如此，不同组的研究人员以不同的方式攻击不同的问题，从语音识别到下棋，AI只是在名义上统一了这个领域。但这个术语却激发了公众的想象力。

自然段C

Most researchers agree that AI peaked around 1985. A public reared on science-fiction movies and excited by the growing power of computers had high expectations. For years, AI researchers had implied that a breakthrough was just around the corner. Marvin Minsky said in 1967 that within a generation the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ would be substantially solved. Prototypes of medical-diagnosis programs and speech recognition software appeared to be making progress. It proved to be a false dawn. Thinking computers and household robots failed to materialise, and a backlash ensued. ‘There was undue optimism in the early 1980s,’ says David Leake, a researcher at Indiana University. ‘Then when people realised these were hard problems, there was retrenchment. By the late 1980s, the term AI was being avoided by many researchers, who opted instead to align themselves with specific sub-disciplines such as neural networks, agent technology, case-based reasoning, and so on.’

自然段C

大多数研究人员认为，AI在1985年左右达到了巅峰。在科幻电影的熏陶下，同时也受到计算机越来越强大的激发，公众对AI寄予了很高的期望。多年来，AI研究人员一直在暗示突破就在拐角处。马文·明斯基在1967年表示，在一个世代内，创造“人工智能”的问题将被基本解决。医学诊断程序和语音识别软件的原型似乎取得了一些进展。但这被证明是一场虚假的黎明。思考能力的计算机和家用机器人并未出现，随之而来的是强烈反弹。印第安纳大学的研究人员大卫·利克说：“20世纪80年代初存在着过度乐观，当人们意识到这些问题很难时，就开始紧缩。到了20世纪80年代末，许多研究人员开始避免使用AI这个术语，而选择与特定的子学科（如神经网络、智能体技术、案例推理等）联系在一起。”

自然段D

Ironically, in some ways AI was a victim of its own success. Whenever an apparently mundane problem was solved, such as building a system that could land an aircraft unattended, the problem was deemed not to have been AI in the first place. ‘If it works, it can’t be AI,’ as Dr Leake characterises it. The effect of repeatedly moving the goal-posts in this way was that AI came to refer to ‘blue-sky’ research that was still years away from commercialisation. Researchers joked that AI stood for ‘almost implemented’. Meanwhile, the technologies that made it onto the market, such as speech recognition, language translation and decision-support software, were no longer regarded as AI. Yet all three once fell well within the umbrella of AI research.

自然段D

具有讽刺意味的是，在某些方面，AI成为了自己成功的受害者。每当解决一个看似平凡的问题时，比如建立一个能够无人陪同着陆飞机的系统，问题往往被认为并不属于AI。“如果它能正常工作，那就不能算作AI，”正如利克博士所形容的那样。这种反复挪移目标的效应导致AI逐渐成为一种离商业化还有多年的“蓝天”研究。研究人员开玩笑说，AI代表着“几乎实现”。与此同时，成功进入市场的技术，如语音识别、语言翻译和决策支持软件，不再被视为AI。然而，这三个技术曾经都属于AI研究的范畴。

自然段E

But the tide may now be turning, according to Dr Leake. HNC Software of San Diego, backed by a government agency, reckon that their new approach to artificial intelligence is the most powerful and promising approach ever discovered. HNC claim that their system, based on a cluster of 30 processors, could be used to spot camouflaged vehicles on a battlefield or extract a voice signal from a noisy background – tasks humans can do well, but computers cannot. ‘Whether or not their technology lives up to the claims made for it, the fact that HNC are emphasising the use of AI is itself an interesting development,’ says Dr Leake.

自然段E

然而，根据利克博士的说法，情况可能正在发生转变。圣地亚哥的HNC软件公司在政府机构的支持下，称他们的人工智能新方法是迄今为止发现的最强大和最有前景的方法。HNC声称他们的系统基于一个由30个处理器组成的集群，可以用于在战场上发现伪装的车辆或从嘈杂的背景中提取语音信号-这是人类很擅长但计算机不能做到的任务。“无论他们的技术是否能够达到所宣称的效果，HNC强调使用AI本身就是一个有趣的发展，”利克博士说道。

自然段F

Another factor that may boost the prospects for AI in the near future is that investors are now looking for firms using clever technology, rather than just a clever business model, to differentiate themselves. In particular, the problem of information overload, exacerbated by the growth of e-mail and the explosion in the number of web pages, means there are plenty of opportunities for new technologies to help filter and categorise information – classic AI problems. That may mean that more artificial intelligence companies will start to emerge to meet this challenge.

自然段F

另一个可能会在不久的将来提振AI前景的因素是，投资者现在正在寻找使用聪明技术而不仅仅是聪明商业模式来区别自己的公司。特别是信息超载问题加剧，电子邮件和网页数量激增，意味着有很多机会可以利用新技术来帮助过滤和分类信息-这是经典的AI问题。这可能意味着会出现更多的人工智能公司来应对这一挑战。

自然段G

The 1969 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, featured an intelligent computer called HAL 9000. As well as understanding and speaking English, HAL could play chess and even learned to lipread. HAL thus encapsulated the optimism of the 1960s that intelligent computers would be widespread by 2001. But 2001 has been and gone, and there is still no sign of a HAL-like computer. Individual systems can play chess or transcribe speech, but a general theory of machine intelligence still remains elusive. It may be, however, that the comparison with HAL no longer seems quite so important, and AI can now be judged by what it can do, rather than by how well it matches up to a 30-year-old science-fiction film. ‘People are beginning to realise that there are impressive things that these systems can do,’ says Dr Leake hopefully.

自然段G

1969年的电影《2001太空漫游》中出现了一个名为HAL 9000的智能计算机。除了理解和说英语外，HAL还会下棋，甚至学会了通过读唇来进行交流。因此，HAL体现了20世纪60年代智能计算机将在2001年普及的乐观态度。但是2001年已经过去了，却还没有看到类似HAL的计算机的踪影。个别系统可以下棋或转录语音，但机器智能的普遍理论仍然难以捉摸。然而，也许与HAL的比较不再显得那么重要，人们现在可以根据AI的实际成就来评判它，而不仅仅是与一个30年前的科幻电影相匹配。“人们开始意识到这些系统能够做到令人印象深刻的事情，”利克博士希望地说道。