RENIASSANCE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Watson is an artificially intelligent computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. The computer system was specifically developed to answer questions on the quiz show 'Jeopardy!'. In 2011, Watson competed on 'Jeopardy!' against former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings.Watson received the first place prize of $1 million. Reference. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)

Marvin Lee Minsky (born August 9, 1927) is an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder ofMassachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory. Minsky published The Emotion Machine, a book that critiques many popular theories of how human minds work and suggests alternative theories, often replacing simple ideas with more complex ones. Recent drafts of the book are freely available from his webpage. He is also the 'inventor' of confocal microscopy.

Da Vinci seemed truly excited by the possibility of people  soaring through the skies like birds.  One of da Vinci’s most famous inventions, the flying machine (also known as the "ornithopter").

Technology is moving fast. Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci dreamed about flying, but he didn't realize that he designed a heavy machine too heavy to fly. It was never possible to fly even if someone built it. People for a while thought it won't be possible for man to fly. Then hot air balloons came which gave way to huge helium ships. People couldn't think at that time that heavy machines can lift a man up in the air. Marvin Minsky or several other pioneers thought that it is possible to build thinking machines better than humans. For a while people, even the experts in computers, believed those geniuses like Minsky and others were just dreaming-the thinking machine concept was considered  "immature". 

The time has come! Now once again we believe it is possible to make machines which can think like humans and probable they may do it even better! The recent papers on pattern recognition, parallel processing, 'big data processing' and networks inspired by neural networking proves this is possible. (Example. Dharmendra S. Modha. Science 8 August 2014: 668-673. 2)Refer article  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data). 

Moda et al have developed an efficient, scalable, and flexible non–von Neumann architecture that leverages contemporary silicon technology. They built a 5.4-billion-transistor chip with 4096 neurosynaptic cores interconnected via an intrachip network that integrates 1 million programmable spiking neurons and 256 million configurable synapses.The architecture is well suited to many applications that use complex neural networks in real time, for example, multiobject detection and classification. Whereas the previous chip was at a level of a worm's nervous system the latest chip is equivalent in complexity to the brain of a bee. It wont take much time for it to evolve to outpace  humans.
When future machines powered by an array of chips of this kind in combination with future "Watsons" would certainly prove better than humans in cognition. Once this is realized feelings and emotions may follow! It is possible because emotions are the result of the complex interplay of neural circuits-we suddenly may discover that 'machines start to feel'! 

Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. He had committed suicide by eating a KCN apple.

On the other side, we can find a huge progress being made in undestanding brain functions (Example Dan Y. Science 8 August 2014: 660-665.) although we are still in childhood. However, it is not mandatory to know how the human brain functions to build a machine which can learn, think and may imagine better than humans! -Sanal MG