AI is in many ways as old as computing itself. The purpose of building computers in the first place was, after all, to perform mathematical tasks such as code breaking that were too tough for humans to tackle. It was in 1950 that Alan Turing, the celebrated second world war code breaker, mathematician and arguably inventor of the first computer, formulated the test that would become the benchmark by which the intelligence of all computer programs would subsequently be measured (see "Turing's test" - below). Even in Turing's day, computers were beginning to outperform humans in certain specific tasks. And as early as 1948, John von Neumann, one of the fathers of the computer revolution, said: "You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you will tell me precisely what it is that a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that." It seemed just a matter of time before computers would outperform people in most mental tasks.