Which of the following is NOT a deployment model of cloud computing?

The correct answer is B, John McCarthy. The American computer scientist John McCarthy used the phrase artificial intelligence in the proposal for the Dartmouth conference of 1956, the meeting generally treated as the birth of the subject as a separate field, and he is therefore called the father of artificial intelligence; he also created the programming language LISP, long used for such work. Option A is wrong because Alan Turing came earlier and asked the deeper question whether machines can think, giving the Turing test in 1950, but he did not use the term artificial intelligence. Option C is wrong because Charles Babbage designed the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine in the nineteenth century and is called the father of the computer, not of artificial intelligence. Option D is wrong because Marvin Minsky, although a founder of the field and a participant at Dartmouth, did not coin the name. Keep the two fatherhoods apart: Babbage for the computer, McCarthy for artificial intelligence.

The correct answer is B. Alan Turing proposed in 1950 that instead of arguing about what thinking means, we should set a practical trial: a human questioner communicates in writing with an unseen machine and an unseen person, and if the questioner cannot reliably tell which is which, the machine is said to have passed. The test therefore judges behaviour from the outside and says nothing about how the machine works inside, which is exactly the point Turing was making. Option A is wrong because processor speed is measured in clock cycles and by benchmark programs, not by a conversation. Option C is wrong because storage is simply counted in bytes and their multiples. Option D is wrong because the strength of an encryption key is judged by its length in bits and by the effort needed to break the cipher, a matter of cryptography. Note the year and the paper together: Turing's question whether machines can think came in 1950, six years before the term artificial intelligence was coined.

The correct answer is C, Software as a Service. In this model the provider runs the finished application on its own servers and the user simply opens it in a browser, managing nothing but the data and a few settings; a web mailbox, an online office suite and a hosted customer records system all work this way. Option A is wrong because Infrastructure as a Service supplies only the raw building blocks, virtual machines, storage and network, and the customer must install the operating system and every program above it. Option B is wrong because Platform as a Service supplies a ready environment with the operating system, the runtime and the database already in place, so that a developer need only upload the application code; it is aimed at developers, not at end users. Option D is wrong because network as a service is not one of the three standard models, which are infrastructure, platform and software. A simple memory rule is that the higher the model, the less the customer manages.

The correct answer is B, Kevin Ashton. The British technologist Kevin Ashton used the phrase Internet of Things in 1999 while working on radio frequency identification tags for tracking goods through a supply chain; his point was that if every object could report its own position and state, the internet would no longer depend on people typing data into it. Option A is wrong because Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989, along with the first browser, the first server and the HTTP protocol, which is a different thing from the Internet of Things. Option C is wrong because Vint Cerf, with Robert Kahn, designed the TCP and IP protocols and is called a father of the internet itself. Option D is wrong because Ray Tomlinson sent the first network email and chose the at sign to separate the user from the host. A useful line to remember is that the web is for documents, the internet is for computers and the Internet of Things is for objects.

The correct answer is A, Radio Frequency Identification. An RFID system has a tag carrying a tiny chip and an antenna, and a reader that sends out radio waves; the tag answers with its stored identity, so an object can be recognised without being seen or touched and without a line of sight, unlike a barcode that must be shown to a scanner. Passive tags carry no battery and draw their power from the reader's signal, which is why they can be made as thin as a label. RFID is used in toll collection, library books, baggage handling, warehouse stock and animal identification, and it was work on exactly such tags that led Kevin Ashton to the phrase Internet of Things. Option B, option C and option D are all invented expansions that do not correspond to any real technology; they are offered only because they use the same letters. Note the related short range technology NFC, near field communication, which is the basis of tap to pay cards.