Which of the following statements about artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning is correct?

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 D, hypervisor cloud, because no such deployment model exists. A hypervisor is a piece of software, also called a virtual machine monitor, that divides one physical server into several virtual machines; it is the tool that makes cloud computing possible, not a way of deploying a cloud. Option A is wrong as an answer because the public cloud, open to any customer who pays for it, is a genuine deployment model and the commonest one. Option B is wrong because a private cloud, built and reserved for a single organisation so that it keeps full control of its data, is equally standard. Option C is wrong because a hybrid cloud, which joins a private cloud to a public one so that sensitive workloads stay inside while sudden peaks of demand spill outside, is the third. The fourth, which the question does not list, is the community cloud, shared by several organisations with a common concern. Do not confuse the four deployment models with the three service models.

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.