Automatons are the forerunners to AI, but don’t underestimate them. They’re cheap, fast, predictable, and do their job perfectly. What’s the difference? Both AI and Automatons branch out from the Theory of Automata, which is a foundational concept of computing. It sees the world as consequences and actions (in their terminology, “states” and “transitions”). Automatons start off very simple; they carry out tasks in a deterministic fashion. Consider it like a branch of finite possibilities, and a