One thing I’ll be mentioning in Part III, as I ran out of space in this one: Drebbel in the 1610s applied his insights into perpetual motion to invent a self-regulating oven/furnace. Using mercury rather than water to trap air in a tube, much like the inverted flask I described, rising temperatures would raise a float sitting on the mercury that would then close the aperture for the air feeding the oven’s flame.

Really nice. Looking forward to it!

I went to the world’s oldest continuously operated library today, in Verona. Since 517. Wow.

Saw a copy of Ars Magna Sciendi, from Kirscher.

No, a control cycle is not AI. Otherwise a dam with an overflow relief is AI too and it has been around much longer than a couple of hundred years.

Then, I would propose that we refer to computational AI and noncomputational AI. Because a control cycle is absolutely what AI is—and yes, it is much older than we think. See Chapter 1 of “Artificial Intelligence: a Modern Approach”

No it’s not, otherwise we wouldn’t have a new term for what a thermostat has been doing forever.

Just look at the Wikipedia definition for a basic start on artificial intelligence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

Um, no. First: thermostats haven’t been around forever (they were popularized by Mark Honeywell in 1906, of Honeywell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_C._Honeywell). Second: autopilot wasn’t invented until 1914 (before computers). Third: the Wikipedia article you refer to totally aligns with what I’m claiming:

“An intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chances of success. Any system that has goal-directed behavior can be analyzed as an intelligent agent: something as simple as a thermostat, as complex as a human being, as well as large systems such as firms, biomes or nations. The intelligent agent paradigm became widely accepted during the 1990s, and currently serves as the definition of the field.”

Cybernetics. That's the term you're looking for, not AI. The governor is a control system.

I’d love to try to see a definition of AI that doesn’t completely overlap with Cybernetics. How do you define AI?