In this chapter it has been shown that prior to the work of Turing, Shannon, McCulloch and Pitts were many unsolved questions in science and many technological issues to overcome. Statistical mechanics and quantum theory, but also computation and number theory set some basics to the work that was developed later. In technological aspects there was a need for a higher speed in the transmitting information via telegraphs. It ignited a rethinking about information that was initiated by Nyquist, developed by Hartley and finalized by Shannon - as one will see here. The first computing machines, and especially the problematic of storage, also led to progress in the information theory, highlighted by the idea of association of documents, like in the memex machine. A document, thanks to association, actually contains more information than only what is written in it. Inspired from physics, early approaches also tried to model the brain as a computing device, as explained here where the main problem was also the transmission of information, but here in the physiological context. This was fundamental to the work of McCulloch and Pitts for neural transmission and will be shown later in this survey. The ”marriage” between the new information technologies and physiology is referred to

cybernetics that allowed to emerge into many new areas of computation. Humans can turn their dream of machines that think to reality. The previously mentioned advancement of technology and knowledge allows humans to finally start defining the thinking machine and build real machines. We’ll see that thanks to this solid technological basis and transition to the digital world, machine models come closer and closer to animals with intelligent behaviours. In a broader context, the information age  is widely referred to the work of Shannon and Turing that build their models to solve the problems of their time.