In 1950, John Von Neumann and Alan Turing did not initiate the word AI but were the pioneers of the technology behind it; they were behind the 19th-century decimal logic (involving values from 0 to 9) and made the transitions of machines to binary logic (that depends on Boolean algebra, that involves 0s and 1s). Their discovery led to modern computers, and that it could execute what was programmed, thus making it a universal machine.
John McCarthy was the first person to use the term "Artificial intelligence" in 1956. Artificial intelligence was coined during this academic conference held at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire. The word has been in use for over six decades, but that does not imply that the journey of understanding a machine could think started at that period. In 1961, Alan Turing delivered a paper on machines being capable of simulating humans and the capacity to make intelligent choices and things such as play cheese.
Although no one could dispute the fact of machines being capable of doing logical things, the question remained if machines were capable of thinking. This question would be agreed by many to be the different point between humans and machines. The field and possibility of technology advancing were obvious, but the challenge was the little memory spaces, and it posed a challenge to utilizing a computer language.