“The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.”

This sentence is the mission statement behind decades of AI research, from symbolic expert systemSoftware that encodes specialist knowledge as rules — early commercial AI before modern machine learning.s to deep learningNeural networks with many layers that learn hierarchical representations from data.. It assumes intelligence is describable in rules and representations — a bet the field is still testing.

The conjecture that launched artificial intelligenceSoftware that performs tasks associated with human intelligence — perception, reasoning, and learning. as a named discipline.

It reframed cognition as an engineering specification problem.