Perhaps the earliest examples of the urge to make artificial persons are the Greek Gods. ... As a present from Zeus to Europa, Hephaestus makes Talos, a man of bronze whose duty is to patrol the beaches of Crete. He thwarts invaders by hurling great rocks at them, or by heating himself red hot and squeezing trespassers in a warm embrace. -Pamela McCorduck from Machines Who Think

The intellectual roots of AI, and the concept of intelligent machines, may be found in Greek mythology. Intelligent artifacts appear in literature since then, with real (and fraudulent) mechanical devices actually demonstrating behaviour with some degree of intelligence. After modern computers became available following World War II, it has become possible to create programs that perform difficult intellectual tasks. Even more importantly, general purpose methods and tools have been created that allow similar tasks to be performed.

Good Places to Start

A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence. By Bruce Buchanan, University Professor Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh. A chronology of significant events in the history of AI, prepared for the Introduction to AI class at the University of Pittsburgh. [Note: We have begun to annotate his history by providing links to resources in AI TOPICS and elsewhere.]

A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. J. McCarthy, M. L. Minsky, N. Rochester, and C.E. Shannon. August 31, 1955. "We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it." And this marks the debut of the term "artificial intelligence."

• Also see this interview with John McCarthy.

The very early days. An interview (available in PDF, Quicktime, and Realmedia) with Donald Michie, Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, and currently a visitor at NSW University of Technology. "Interested in AI from 1942, Donald Michie conceived, founded and directed the UK's first AI laboratory at Edinburgh, and has since been active in AI projects around the World. ... His talk will cover the period from 1942, when Alan Turing was a colleague at Bletchley Park, up to 1965, when the Edinburgh AI laboratory was truly launched. He will cover the theories, the practice, the personalities and the politics, and on past form may be expected to do so without pulling any punches." This is just one of the 4 presentations given at the October 2002 seminar, Artificial Intelligence - Recollections of the Pioneers.

Volkswagen wins robotic race across the desert. By David L Chandler. NewScientist news (October 10, 2005). "A robotic Volkswagen called 'Stanley', developed by a team from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, won a $2 million prize on Sunday for winning a tough desert race of driverless vehicles.... 'These vehicles haven't just achieved world records, they have made history,' says DARPA director Tony Tether."

Timeline exhibit at the Computer History Museum. "This timeline explores the history of computing from 1945 to 1990. Each year features illustrated descriptions of significant innovations in hardware and software technology, as well as milestones in areas such as commercial applications and artificial intelligence. When appropriate, biographical sketches of the pioneers responsible for the advances are included."

• Computers - wonderful photos, specs and more about ENIAC, AVIDAC, Manchester Mark I, Pilot ACE, MIT Whirlwind, UNIVAC I, Micral, and many others.
• Software & Languages - here are just two examples from this exciting collection:
  • "Claude Shannon's 'The Mathematical Theory of Communication' showed engineers how to code data so they could check for accuracy after transmission between computers. Shannon identified the bit as the fundamental unit of data and, coincidentally, the basic unit of computation."
  • " LISP made its debut as the first computer language designed for writing artificial intelligence programs. Created by John McCarthy, LISP offered programmers flexibility in organization."
• Also see their This Day in History collection.

A History of A.I.. By Paula Lemyre (June 22, 2001). Part of Discovery Channel Canada's AI mini-site. "Since long before the Industrial Revolution, we have dreamed of building machines that think. Well before computers even existed, the lure of creating artificial intelligence (A.I.) captured the imaginations of scientists and engineers, and writers alike."

Robots/ Mechanical Life. NPR Talk of the Nation: Science Friday With Ira Flatow (August 30, 2002). "This week, an automated convenience store opened in Washington. This robo-mart dispenses snacks, toiletries, and even DVDs. From housekeeping to the battlefield to your neighborhood convenience store, researchers are creating robots to live with us and work for us. In this hour, we'll look at how robots may change our lives. Plus, early attempts to create mechanical life." Guests: Rodney Brooks & Gaby Wood. You can listen to the radio broadcast by clicking here.

Timeline: Real robots - "Robots are not new. They have been around for centuries in various forms. Here's a brief overview of the development of both robots and computers." From BBC News.

The Big Picture - A Short History of Robotics and Thinking Machines. Part of the teaching guide for the Scientific American Frontiers in the classroom series: ROBOTS ALIVE!

Readings Online

As We May Think. By Vannevar Bush. Atlantic Monthly, July 1945. A vision of the future in which computers assist humans in many activities.

Claude E. Shannon: Founder of Information Theory. By Graham P. Collins. Scientific American Explore (October 14, 2002). "Shannon's M.I.T. master's thesis in electrical engineering has been called the most important of the 20th century: in it the 22-year-old Shannon showed how the logical algebra of 19th-century mathematician George Boole could be implemented using electronic circuits of relays and switches. This most fundamental feature of digital computers' design -- the representation of 'true' and 'false' and '0' and '1' as open or closed switches, and the use of electronic logic gates to make decisions and to carry out arithmetic -- can be traced back to the insights in Shannon's thesis."

The Discovery of the Artificial: Behavior, Mind and Machines Before and Beyond Cybernetics. By Roberto Cordeschi. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 2002. As stated in the Introduction (available online from the author): "The 'discovery' in the title of this book refers to the coming of age of a new concept of the machine. This concept is at the core of a methodology that profoundly influenced the sciences of the mind and behavior in the twentieth century. The main ambition of this methodology was to overcome, through that new concept of the machine, traditional oppositions between the inorganic and organic worlds, between the laws that govern the behavior of physical systems and those that govern the behavior of organisms, and between causal and teleological explanation. The origins of this methodology are usually traced back to the middle of the 1940s, with the advent of cybernetics, which Norbert Wiener described, in his 1948 book, as the study of 'control and communication in the animal and the machine.' ... One of my central claims is that certain basic features of the simulative methodology whose origins are usually put no further back than cybernetics, actually go back in significant ways to the early decades of the twentieth century."

• Several sample pages are also available online from the publisher.

Machine Translation's Past and Future. A timeline covering the span from 1629 through the year 2264! Compiled by Kristin Demos and Mark Frauenfelder (Wired, 8.05 - May 2000).

Knowledge Processing -- From File Servers to Knowledge Servers. By Edward Feigenbaum. "This chapter from Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Intelligent Machines (published in 1990) addresses the history and development of AI, and where it was headed, circa 1990." Excerpt: "Like all creators, scientists and technologists must dream, must put forth a vision, or else they relegate their work to almost pointless incrementalism. ... The early dreaming included dreams about intelligent behavior at very high levels of competence. Turing speculated on wide-ranging conversations between people and machines and on chess playing programs. Later Newell and Simon wrote about champion-level chess programs and began their work toward that end. Samuel (checker playing), Gelernter (geometry-theorem proving), and others shared the dream. At Stanford, Lederberg and I chose reasoning in science as our task and began work with Buchanan and Djerassi on building a program that would elucidate chemical structure at a high level of competence: the DENDRAL program."

Computers and Thought. Edited by Edward A. Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman. AAAI Press. The following excerpt is from the Preface which is available online: "Computers and Thought is indeed a treasure. Some of the papers are as important today for their fundamental ideas as they were in the late 1950s and early 1960s when they were written. Others are interesting as early milestones of fields that have expanded and changed dramatically. Afew are interesting in that they represent work that simply did not go anywhere. Some of the papers describe key work that is not typically taught any more, but is 'buried' deeply in the conceptual structure of AI—a heritage that needs to be honored and preserved. ... Today’s young AI researcher can not easily imagine the excitement of the early years of AI, from which the papers of this volume are drawn." You can see which papers were included by viewing the Contents page.

Ramon Lull and the Infidels. By Clark Glymour, Kenneth M. Ford and Patrick J. Hayes. (1998) AI Magazine 19(2): 136. "Many of the fundamental ideas in artificial intelligence have an ancient heritage. Some of the most fundamental, surely, are that thinking is a computational process, that computational processes involve combining symbols, that computation can be made mechanical, and that the mathematics of computation involves combinatorics. All of these ideas have their origin, so far as we know, in the work of an eccentric 13th century Spanish genius, Ramon Lull (1232-1316). Lull's sources were partly mystical, but the interesting part of his thought drew from - or against - an analytic tradition in logic and combinatorics."

AI Matures and Flourishes in North America. By David Mike Hamilton, Tom M. Mitchell, and Carol M. Hamilton. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 18(4): 87-88, c3 (July/August 2003). "Separate artificial intelligence organizations in North America have existed for nearly 40 years. From humble beginnings,when a small interest group served the field, to today,when AI groups serve every niche, AI is flourishing.The oldest AI organization in the region is SIGART, the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence. SIGART began publishing a newsletter for its members in the mid 1960s...."

AI's Greatest Trends and Controversies. Marti A. Hearst and Haym Hirsh, Editors. IEEE Intelligent Systems (January/February 2000). A timely and thought provoking collection of views from AI scholars and practitioners.

Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh University: a Perspective. By Jim Howe (November 1994). "The Department of Artificial Intelligence can trace its origins to a small research group established in a flat at 4 Hope Park Square in 1963 by Donald Michie, then Reader in Surgical Science. During the Second World War, through his membership of Max Newman's code-breaking group at Bletchley Park, Michie had been introduced to computing and had come to believe in the possibility of building machines that could think and learn. By the early 1960s, the time appeared to be ripe to embark on this endeavour."

In Pursuit of Mind: The Research of Allen Newell. By John E. Laird and Paul S. Rosenbloom. (1992). AI Magazine 13 (4): 17-45. A brief review of Allen Newell's research career, starting with symbolic computation in 1954, and continuing through the present involving Soar and its ramifications. Included within the article is a remembrance of Allen Newell written by Herbert Simon.

AI: Early History and Applications. Chapter One of George F. Luger's textbook, Artificial Intelligence: Structures and Strategies for Complex Problem Solving, 5th Edition (Addison-Wesley; 2005), is available online. "As one of the originators of the science of operations research, as well as the designer of the first programmable mechanical computing machines, Charles Babbage, a nineteenth century mathematician, may also be considered an early practitioner of artificial intelligence (Morrison and Morrison 1961). Babbage's difference engine was a special-purpose machine for computing the values of certain polynomial functions and was the forerunner of his analytical engine. The analytical engine, designed but not successfully constructed during his lifetime, was a general-purpose programmable computing machine that presaged many of the architectural assumptions underlying the modern computer."

MIT Laboratory for Computer Science's timeline of major milestones.

• Also see :
  • Architects of the Information Society: Thirty-Five Years of the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT, by Simson Garfinkel and edited by Hal Abelson (1999; MIT Press).
  • MIT's computer science, AI labs merge. MIT News Office (May 28, 2003).

The man-machine and artificial intelligence. By Bruce Mazlish, Department of History, MIT. In Constructions of the Mind--Artificial Intelligence and the Humanities. A special issue of the Stanford Humanities Review 4(2): Spring 1995. Stefano Franchi and Guven Guzeldere, editors. "In the history of mechanical contrivances, it is difficult to know how many of the automata of antiquity were constructed only in legend or by actual scientific artifice. Icarus's wings melt in the light of historical inquiry, as they were reputed to do in the myth; but was the flying automaton, attributed to a Chinese scientist of c. 380 BC actually in the air for three days, as related? (The same story is told of Archytas of Tarentum.) The mix of fact and fiction is a subject of critical importance for the history of science and technology; for our purposes, the aspirations of semi-mythical inventors can be as revealing as their actual embodiment in levers and gears."

The Great 1980s AI Bubble: A Review of The Brain Makers, by H.P. Newquist (book review), By Hans Moravec. AI Magazine, 15(3): 86-87. Also available from his list of publications.

Whatever happened to machines that think? By Justin Mullins. New Scientist (April 23, 2005; Issue 2496: pages 32 - 37). "This early success contributed to a sense of optimism that the problems of AI could be overcome, much of it based on the idea that some kind of grand unified theory of mind would emerge that would offer up a scheme to create artificial intelligence on a platter. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw feverish speculation about the impact intelligent machines might have on the world and the advantages they would bring to whoever developed them. The computer HAL in Stanley Kubrick's classic 1968 movie 2001: A space odyssey summed up the visions being debated, and the fears they conjured up. It was against this backdrop that Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry announced, in 1982, a programme called the Fifth Generation Computer Systems project to develop massively parallel computers that would take computing and AI to a new level. ... An arms race of sorts ensued in which the US and Japan vied for supremacy." [Note: A brief history of AI timeline appears at the end of the article.]

The Dream of Mechanical Life - Man and automata. By Hugh Ormsby-Lennon. The Weekly Standard (December 23, 2002 Volume 008, Issue 15). "A spate of new books [editor's note: 13 booksto be exact] addresses eighteenth-century automata, ventriloquists' dummies, and puppets--together with more recent avatars of chess computers, artificial intelligence, androids, robots, and cyborgs. Does 'computerization' challenge human identity as ominously as 'mechanization' previously seemed to? ... So, does artificial intelligence transcend Freudian nightmare now that it has come to suggest not itinerant showmen or tinkerers with clockwork but university scientists, computer moguls, and global corporations? Or does a scientist with an uncanny puppet always remain mad or charlatanical?"

Tools for Thought. The 1985 edition of Howard Rheingold's book is available online. (The revised 2000 edition is available from the MIT Press.) As stated by the author on each chapter page: "The idea that people could use computers to amplify thought and communication, as tools for intellectual work and social activity, was not an invention of the mainstream computer industry or orthodox computer science, nor even homebrew computerists; their work was rooted in older, equally eccentric, equally visionary, work. You can't really guess where mind-amplifying technology is going unless you understand where it came from."

Book Review: M. Mitchell Waldrop's "The Dream Machine - J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal," by Bob Spinrad. Wired (October 2001/9.10). "Yet Lick insisted that computers had to connect to people on people's terms, not the machines'. The interface had to be intuitive. Expressed most vividly in his 1960 paper 'Man-Computer Symbiosis,' Lick's visions seem boringly familiar today: personal computers, graphical interfaces, voice interaction, the Internet (he called it the Intergalactic Computer Network), online reference sources, and what we now call intelligent agents."

• Thanks to KurzweilAI, Man-Computer Symbiosis by J.C.R. Licklider is available online. "Written in 1960, this essay foresaw the growing dependence upon computers for more and more intelligent functions, and an age of human/computer interdependence in which the distinction between the two becomes increasingly blurred. Originally published in IEE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, volume HFE-1, pages 411, March 1960."
• also see: Waldrop, M. Mitchell. 2001. The Origins of Personal Computing. Scientific American 285 (6): 84-91.

• Also see his book, The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine.

A short history of the computer. Technology Research News. "The first general purpose electronic computer appeared more than half a century ago. The Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC), which contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, required 1,800 square feet to rest its bulk, and cost three quarters of a million dollars, was the culmination of centuries of advances in computational devices, mathematics and electronics. ... The first graphics program, Sketchpad, was developed by Ivan Sutherland at MIT in 1962. The first computer game, Spacewar!, also emerged at MIT around the same time."

AI: the story so far. [ Parts 1 and 2 ] By Graeme Wearden. ZDNet UK. (January 23, 2001). "The term artificial intelligence, or AI, was coined at the ground-breaking Dartmouth conference of 1956. But man's interest in the notion that a machine could be given the ability to think can be traced back to the myths and stories of the ancient world."

Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life. By Gaby Wood. Faber, 2002. Book extract available online from The Observer: "The 18th-century mechanician, Jacques de Vaucanson, made 'robots' that were capable of playing musical instruments as melodiously as human beings - but it was his incontinent duck that has fascinated down the ages."

• Author Q & A provided by Anchor Books, publisher of the paperback edition (2003). "Q: You begin your 'Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life' at a very specific place and time: with the story of the philosopher Rene Descartes sailing to Sweden in the mid-17th-century, in the company of an android. Why this moment? A [Gaby Wood]: Although people have tried to construct mechanical simulations of human and animal life for millennia (from Plato’s contemporary, Archytas of Tarentum, to Albertus Magnus, a 13th-century Dominican monk), I wanted to show that it was only really during the Enlightenment that these attempts became more than practical enterprises: they were philosophical experiments as well. Descartes was an immediate precursor to the philosophers of the 18th century who were preoccupied with the question of whether humans were born with a soul, or were merely very complex machines. In their quest for an answer to this question, they built machines in the image of men and women, thinking: if men are just machines, then does a mechanically-constructed man amount to a human being? ..."
• Wise guys and living dolls - The line between machine and man has fascinated inventors and tricksters down the centuries. Book Review by Simon Schaffer. The Observer (2/24/02).

Related Web Sites

Artificial Intelligence History. A detailed timeline from Stottler Henke Associates, Inc.

Milestones in the Development of Artificial Intelligence. By Mark Kantrowitz.

AAAI Fellows. A complete list the men and women whose longterm contributions to AI have placed them among this honored group.

• Also of historical interest is the collection of AAAI Presidential Addresses

The Computer Conservation Socitey (UK). "The Society was formed in 1989 as an initiative between the British Computer Society and the Science Museum of London. It was a time when the computer industry had existed for about half a century, and when many people had spent a professional lifetime in the industry. The industry had matured, but was still poised for ever greater technological and social changes as it had been from its beginnings in the 1940s. It was time to take stock and reflect on the extraordinary developments to date, and in particular, to be concerned that many of the pioneering people and hardware and software were fast disappearing."

• Artificial Intelligence - Recollections of the Pioneers (Seminar, 11th October 2002): "'Artificial Intelligence' has been an objective for computer workers from Alan Turing onwards. Its pursuit has led to valuable application systems, and to theories of the working of the human brain, but also to great controversy and disputation. Four pioneers from various stages of the development will discuss the history, the achievements and the potential future."
  • Donald Michie, Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, and currently a visitor at NSW University of Technology: The very early days.
  • Jim Doran, Essex University Edinburgh & Essex: the past & the future for AI.
  • Aaron Sloman, Birmingham University: AI and the study of mind.
  • Austin Tate, AIAI, University of Edinburgh: Putting AI to Use.

Computer History Collection at The Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

Computer History Museum, "the world's largest and most significant history museum for preserving and presenting the computing revolution and its impact on the human experience. It allows you to discover how computing became the amplifier for our minds and changed the way we work, live and play."

• Be sure to see Mastering the Game: A History of Computer Chess.

Courses in the History of Computing. A list of universities offering courses in the history of computing compiled by Professor Martin Campbell-Kelly, Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick.

History of Computing, maintained by John Impagliazzo, Professor of Computer Science, Hofstra University, New York. Collections include: Computing Museums and Useful History Sites.

IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.

Mind Models: Artificial Intelligence Discovery At Carnegie Mellon. An online exhibit from Carnegie Mellon's University Archives. "For a half century, Carnegie Mellon University has been a leader in the research and design of artificial intelligence (AI) - the creation of 'thinking machines'. Many of CMU's achievements came from pioneering work by professors Herbert A. Simon and Allen Newell."

Software History Center. "The Software History Center is dedicated to preserving the history of the software industry, one of the largest and most influential industries in the world today. The industry originated with the entrepreneurial computer software and services companies of the 1950s and 1960s, grew dramatically through the 1970s and 1980s to become a market force rivaling that of the computer hardware companies, and by the 1990s had become the supplier of technical know-how that transformed the way people worked, played and communicated every day of their lives. The SHC is working to preserve for future generations information about the companies, people, products, and events that shaped the evolution of this vital industry."

Timeline. From The Age of Spiritual Machines, by Raymond Kurzweil. It covers the period from "10-15 billion years ago" to "2099 ... [and] Some many millenniums hence."

Timeline for the Evolution of Cybernetics. From the American Society for Cybernetics' (ACS) History of Cybernetics. "Cybernetics precipitated out of diverse threads of work fortuitously intersecting during the 1940's. In the ensuing decades, the themes circumscribing cybernetics' original definition diverged again to engender or facilitate the rise of an even greater diversity of fields, labels, and disciplines. ... [The timeline] is deliberately intended to reflect at least a sample of the many subjects and disciplines from which cybernetics descended and into which its themes subsequently flowed."

Related Pages in AI Topics

• AI in the news collection - History
• AI Quotations
• Brief History
• our FAQ Collection where you'll find the question: Do you know where I can find information about "old" AI programs, systems, and projects ?
• The Future
• Interviews and Oral Histories
• Milestones in the Making? - from AI in the news collection
• Namesakes
• Tributes
• our Wellspring Initiative

More Readings

Buchanan, Bruce G. 1983. Memos from the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory: An Introduction to the COMTEX Microfiche Edition. AI Magazine 4 (4): 37-41.

Cohen, Jonathan. 1967. Human Robots in Myth and Science. New York: A.S. Barnes. (Earlier printing: 1966, London: Allen and Unwin.)

Crevier, Daniel. 1993. AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence. New York: Basic Books of Harper Collins Publishers.

Dean, Thomas, James Allen, and Yiannis Aloimonos. 1995. Artificial Intelligence: Theory and Practice. Redwood City, CA: The Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Co., Inc. The end of each subject-oriented chapter gives a thumbnail sketch of major contributors in special fields within AI.

Feigenbaum, Edward A., and Julian Feldman., editors. 1995. Computers and Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. This book, originally published in 1963, contains twenty classic papers by pioneers in the field of AI.

Freitas, Robert A. Jr. and William P. Gilbreath, eds. Advanced Automation for Space Missions. Proceedings of the 1980 NASA/ASEE Summer Study (NASA Conference Publication 2255). Portions of the report are available online, including the Introduction: "This document is the final report of a study on the feasibility of using machine intelligence, including automation and robotics, in future space missions. The 10-week study was conducted during the summer of 1980 by 18 educators from universities throughout the United States who worked with 15 NASA program engineers. The specific study objectives were to identify and analyze several representative missions that would require extensive applications of machine intelligence, and then to identify technologies that must be developed to accomplish these types of missions." Some of the other sections available online are Survey of Artificial Intelligence and History of NASA Automation Activities.

Gardner, Martin. 1968. Logic Machines, Diagrams, and Boolean Algebra. New York: Dover.

Glymour, Clark, Kenneth Ford, and Patrick Hayes. 1995. The Prehistory of Android Epistemology. In Computation and Intelligence: Collected Readings, ed. Luger, George F., 3-21. Menlo Park/Cambridge/London: AAAI Press/The MIT Press.

Hodges, Andrew. 1983. Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Hogan, James P. 1997. Mind Matters: Exploring the World of Artificial Intelligence. New York: Ballantine Publishing Group.

• Also see: Voices in Your Head series hosted by Dave Slusher: "James P. Hogan and host Dave Slusher discuss how the film 2001 started Hogan on a career as an author, on his relationship with Marvin Minsky and the world of artificial intelligence...." (December 22, 2004).

Kowalski, Robert. 1988. The Early Years of Logic Programming. Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 31: 38-43.

Kurzweil, Raymond. 1990. In The Age of the Intelligent Machine. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Chapters 1-6 (pp. 1-214).

McCarthy, John. 1978. History of LISP. In History of Programming Languages: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference, 1978, ed. Wexenblatt, R. L., 173-197. New York: Academic Press, 1981.

McCorduck, Pamela. Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence. A K Peters, Natick, Mass., 2004.

• AI at the Inception - A 25th-anniversary edition of a classic chronicles the fledgling science of artificial intelligence. Book review by Henry Fountain. Scientific American (May 2004). "When Machines Who Think was first published in 1979, it was an up-to-the-moment history. But in a digital world, that moment was an eternity ago, so McCorduck has appended a 30,000-word afterword to bring the reader up-to-date. ... Her story begins long before the advent of computing, in ancient thinking about the human need to make something in our own image. McCorduck sees AI research as the continuation of a long tradition of thought, encompassing everything from the Ten Commandments' prohibition against idols to Mary Shelley and her Frankenstein monster. ... That slow infusion of AI into everyday computing picked up speed after 1979, and in the afterword McCorduck gives a taste of these advances and of recent research in robotics, natural-language processing and other fields that are, in essence, AI spin-offs."
• Also see Pamela McCorduck's FAQ Collection. Questions include: How long has the human race dreamed about thinking machines? Artificial intelligence - is it real? What so-called smart computers do -- is that really thinking? Shouldn't we just say no to intelligent machines? Aren't the risks too scary? and, What's ahead as AI succeeds even more?

McCorduck, Pamela 1979. Machines Who Think. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company. A fascinating "must-read" that traces the quest for artificial intelligence back to ancient times, and then proceeds though various current topics with readable explanations and lively interview excerpts. [Updated in 2004.]

• McCorduck's Machines Who Think after Twenty-Five Years Revisiting the Origins of AI. Book Review by Philip Mirowski. AI Magazine 24(4): Winter 2003, 135-138.
• Excerpt from Pamela McCorduck's Letter to the Editor, AI Magazine 25(1): Spring 2004, 5:
  • "Machines Who Think will be reissued by A K Peters Ltd. (Natick, MA) in March 2004. This twenty-fifth anniversary edition will contain a lenghty afterword.... It will also have two time lines, one where the history of AI is narrowly construed, and another where AI is cast into a far larger context of human endeavor...."

Markoff, John. 2005. What the Dormouse Said - How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. Viking. "An unparalleled history of how technology and the counterculture came together in the 1960s, created the cult of the personal computer, and shaped today's Silicon Valley."

• Also see:
  • some reviews from our AI in the news collection
  • What the Dormouse Said: An interview with John Markoff. Ubiquity (August 10 - 16, 2005; Volume 6, Issue 29).
  • SDForum Distinguished Speaker Series: John Markoff (June 8, 2005). Listen to this two part presentation available from IT Conversations.
  • The Dream of a Lifetime. By Bill Joy. Technology Review (August 2005)

Minsky, Marvin. 1983. Early MIT Artificial Intelligence Memos: An Introduction to the COMTEX Microfiche Edition. AI Magazine 4 (1): 19-22.

Moravec, Hans. 1988. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. A lively and accessible overview of the field of robotics from the Director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, including historical development as well as social issues.

Newell, Allen. 1984. Reports on Artificial Intelligence from Carnegie Mellon University: Introduction to the COMTEX Microfiche Edition. AI Magazine 5 (3): 35-39.

Newell, Allen. 1983. Some Intellectual Issues in the History of Artificial Intelligence. In The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Machlup, F. and U. Mansfield, 187-227. New York: Wiley.

Newell, Allen, and Herbert A. Simon. 1972. Human Problem Solving. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.; Prentice-Hall. Be sure to see the Historical Addendum (pages 873 - 889).

Newquist, Harvey P. 1994. The Brain Makers: Genius, Ego and Greed in the Quest for Machines that Think. Sams Publishing, Indianapolis, Indiana. See the review by Hans Moravec.

Nilsson, Nils J. 1984. SRI Artificial Intelligence Center Technical Notes: An Introduction to the COMTEX Microfiche Edition. AI Magazine 5 (1): 41-52.

Patterson, Dan W. 1990. Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Chapter 1 (pp. 1-8).

Russell, Stuart, and Peter Norvig. 1995. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Chapters 1 and 2 (pp. 1-52) present a readable conceptual analysis of AI, including its history and problems in making an "intelligent agent."

Selfridge, Oliver G. 1993. The Gardens of Learning: A Vision for AI. AI Magazine 14(2): 36-48. "I have watched AI since its beginnings ... In 1943, I was an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and met a man whom I was soon to be a roommate with. He was but three years older than I, and he was writing what I deem to be the first directed and solid piece of work in AI (McCulloch and Pitts 1943) His name was Walter Pitts, and he had teamed up with a neurophysiologist named Warren McCulloch, who was busy finding out how neurons worked (McCulloch and Pitts 1943)."

Swade, D. D. 1993. Redeeming Charles Babbage's Mechanical Computer. Scientific American 268 (2): 86-91.

Woodbury, David O. 1959. The Translating Machine. The Atlantic Monthly (Volume 204, No. 2; pages 60 - 64). "Professor William N. Locke, head of MIT's modern languages department and a prime mover in machine translation, is not going to be satisfied even with this kind of short cut. He would like to have a machine that will translate material that is merely spoken to it. This is not so fantastic as it sounds."

At the AAAI-2000 conference in Austin, a visitor to the AI Topics booth asked if I could provide more information about Hephaestus and Talos. So for him and everyone else who is interested in Greek mythology, here are links to two pages (complete with illustrations) from Carlos Parada's Greek Mythology Link [http://homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/]:

• Hephaestus
• Talos 1