INTRODUCTION
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 demonstrated to behave
with some degree of intelligence. Some of these conceptual achievements
are listed below under "Ancient History."
After modern computers became available,
following World War II, it has become possible to create programs
that perform difficult intellectual tasks. From these programs,
general tools are constructed which have applications in a wide
variety of everday problems. Some of these computational milestones
are listed below under "Modern History."
ANCIENT
HISTORY
Greek myths of Hephaestus
and Pygmalion incorporate the idea of intelligent robots. Many
other myths in antiquity involve human-like artifacts. Many mechanical
toys and models were actually constructed, e.g., by Hero, Daedalus
and other real persons.
5th century B.C.
Aristotle invented
syllogistic logic, the first formal
deductive reasoning system.
13th century
Talking
heads were said to have been created, Roger Bacon and Albert
the Great reputedly among the owners.
Ramon
Llull, Spanish theologian, invented machines for discovering
nonmathematical truths through combinatories.
15th century
Invention of printing using moveable
type. Gutenberg Bible printed (1456).
15th-16th century
Clocks, the first modern measuring
machines, were first produced using lathes.
16th century
Clockmakers extended their craft
to creating mechanical animals and other novelties.
Rabbi Loew of Prague is said to have
invented the Golem,
a clay man brought to life (1580).
17th century
Early in the century, Descartes
proposed that bodies of animals are nothing more than complex
machines. Many other 17th century thinkers offered variations
and elaborations of Cartesian mechanism.
Hobbes published
The Leviathan, containing a material
and combinatorial theory of thinking.
Pascal
created the first mechanical digital
calculating machine (1642).
Leibniz improved
Pascal's machine to do multiplication
& division (1673) and evisioned a universal calculus of reasoning
by which arguments could be decided mechanically.
18th century
The 18th century saw a profusion
of mechanical toys, including
the celebrated mechanical
duck of Vaucanson and von Kempelen's phony mechanical chess
player, The Turk (1769).
19th century
Luddites (led
by Ned Ludd) destroyed machinery in England (1811-1816).
Mary Shelley published the story
of Frankenstein's monster
(1818).
George
Boole developed a binary algebra representing (some) "laws
of thought."
Charles Babbage
& Ada Byron (Lady Lovelace)
worked on programmable mechanical calculating machines.
20th
century - First Half
Bertrand Russell
and Alfred North Whitehead published Principia
Mathematica, which revolutionaized formal logic. Russell,
Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Rudolf
Carnap lead philosophy into logical analysis of knowledge.
Karel
Capek's play "R.U.R." (Rossum's
Universal Robots) opens in London (1923). - First use
of the word 'robot' in English.
Warren McCulloch & Walter Pitts publish "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in
Nervous Activity" (1943), laying foundations for neural
networks.
Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert
Wiener & Julian Bigelow coin the term "cybernetics" in a 1943
paper. Wiener's popular book by that name published in 1948.
Vannevar Bush published
As We May Think (Atlantic
Monthly, July 1945) a prescient vision of the future in which
computers assist humans in many activities.
A.M.
Turing published "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950).
- Introduction of Turing Test
as a way of operationalizing a test of intelligent behavior.
Claude
Shannon published detailed analysis of chess
playing as search (1950).
Isaac Asimov published his three
laws of robotics (1950).
MODERN HISTORY
1956 |
John
McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" as
the topic of the Dartmouth Conference,
the first conference devoted to the subject. |
|
Demonstration of the first running
AI program, the Logic Theorist
(LT) written by Allen
Newell, J.C. Shaw and Herbert
Simon (Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie
Mellon University). |
1957 |
The General
Problem Solver (GPS) demonstrated by Newell,
Shaw & Simon. |
1952-62 |
Arthur
Samuel (IBM) wrote the first game-playing program, for
checkers, to achieve sufficient
skill to challenge a world champion. Samuel's machine
learning programs were responsible for the high performance
of the checkers player. |
1958 |
John
McCarthy (MIT) invented the Lisp
language. |
|
Herb Gelernter & Nathan Rochester
(IBM) described a theorem prover in geometry that exploits
a semantic model of the domain in the form of diagrams of
"typical" cases. |
|
Teddington Conference on the
Mechanization of Thought Processes was held in the UK and
among the papers presented were John McCarthy's "Programs
with Common Sense," Oliver Selfridge's "Pandemonium,"
and Marvin Minsky's "Some Methods of Heuristic Programming
and Artificial Intelligence." |
Late
50's & Early 60's |
Margaret Masterman
& colleagues at Cambridge design semantic
nets for machine translation. |
1961 |
James Slagle (PhD dissertation,
MIT) wrote (in Lisp) the first
symbolic integration program, SAINT, which solved calculus
problems at the college freshman level. |
1962 |
First industrial robot company,
Unimation, founded. |
1963 |
Thomas Evans' program, ANALOGY,
written as part of his PhD work at MIT, demonstrated that
computers can solve the same analogy problems as are given
on IQ tests. |
|
Ivan Sutherland's MIT dissertation
on Sketchpad introduced the idea of
interactive graphics into computing. |
|
Edward A. Feigenbaum & Julian
Feldman published Computers
and Thought, the first collection of articles
about artificial intelligence. |
1964 |
Danny Bobrow's dissertation
at MIT (tech.report #1 from MIT's AI group, Project MAC),
shows that computers can understand natural
language well enough to solve algebra word problems correctly. |
|
Bert Raphael's MIT dissertation
on the SIR program demonstrates the power of a logical representation
of knowledge for question-answering systems |
1965 |
J. Alan Robinson invented
a mechanical proof procedure, the Resolution
Method, which
allowed programs to work efficiently with formal logic
as a representation
language. |
|
Joseph Weizenbaum (MIT) built
ELIZA, an interactive
program that carries on a dialogue in English on any topic.
It was a popular toy at AI centers on the ARPA-net when a
version that "simulated" the dialogue of a psychotherapist
was programmed. |
1966 |
Ross Quillian (PhD dissertation,
Carnegie Inst. of Technology; now CMU) demonstrated semantic
nets. |
|
First Machine
Intelligence workshop at Edinburgh - the first of an influential
annual series organized by Donald
Michie and others. |
|
Negative report on machine
translation kills much work in Natural
Language Processing (NLP) for many years. |
1967 |
Dendral
program (Edward Feigenbaum, Joshua
Lederberg, Bruce Buchanan, Georgia Sutherland at Stanford)
demonstrated to interpret mass spectra on organic chemical
compounds. First successful knowledge-based
program for scientific reasoning. |
|
Joel Moses (PhD work at MIT)
demonstrated the power of symbolic reasoning for integration
problems in the Macsyma program. First successful knowledge-based
program in mathematics. |
|
Richard Greenblatt at MIT built
a knowledge-based chess-playing
program, MacHack, that was good enough to achieve a class-C
rating in tournament play. |
Late 60s |
Doug
Engelbart invented the mouse at SRI. |
1968 |
Marvin Minsky & Seymour Papert
publish Perceptrons, demonstrating limits of simple neural
nets. |
1969 |
SRI robot, Shakey,
demonstrated combining locomotion, perception and problem
solving. |
|
Roger Schank (Stanford) defined
conceptual dependency model for natural
language understanding. Later developed (in PhD dissertations
at Yale) for use in story understanding by Robert Wilensky
and Wendy Lehnert, and for use in understanding memory by
Janet Kolodner. |
|
First International Joint Conference
on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) held
in Washington, D.C. |
1970 |
Jaime Carbonell (Sr.) developed
SCHOLAR, an interactive program for computer-aided
instruction based on semantic
nets as the representation
of knowledge. |
|
Bill Woods described Augmented
Transition Networks (ATN's) as a representation for natural
language understanding. |
|
Patrick Winston's PhD program,
ARCH, at MIT learned concepts from examples in the world of
children's blocks. |
Early
70's |
Jane Robinson & Don Walker established
influential Natural Language Processing group at SRI. |
1971 |
Terry Winograd's PhD thesis
(MIT) demonstrated the ability of computers to understand
English sentences in a restricted world of children's blocks,
in a coupling of his language understanding program, SHRDLU,
with a robot arm that carried out instructions typed in English. |
1972 |
Prolog
developed by Alain Colmerauer. |
1973 |
The Assembly Robotics group
at Edinburgh University builds Freddy,
the Famous Scottish Robot, capable of using vision to locate
and assemble models. |
1974 |
Ted Shortliffe's PhD dissertation
on MYCIN (Stanford) demonstrated
the power of rule-based systems for knowledge representation
and inference in the domain of medical diagnosis and therapy.
Sometimes called the first expert
system. |
|
Earl Sacerdoti developed one
of the first planning programs,
ABSTRIPS, and developed techniques of hierarchical planning. |
1975 |
Marvin Minsky published his
widely-read and influential
article on Frames as a representation
of knowledge, in which many ideas about schemas and semantic
links are brought together. |
|
The Meta-Dendral learning
program produced new results in chemistry (some rules of
mass spectrometry) the first scientific discoveries by a
computer to be published in a refereed journal. |
Mid
70's |
Barbara Grosz (SRI) established
limits to traditional AI approaches to discourse
modeling. Subsequent work by Grosz, Bonnie Webber and
Candace Sidner developed the notion of "centering", used in
establishing focus of discourse and anaphoric references in
NLP. |
|
Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg
(Xerox PARC) developed the Smalltalk language, establishing
the power of object-oriented programming and of icon-oriented
interfaces. |
|
David Marr and MIT colleagues
describe the "primal sketch" and its role in visual perception. |
1976 |
Doug
Lenat's AM program (Stanford PhD dissertation) demonstrated
the discovery model (loosely-guided search for interesting
conjectures). |
|
Randall Davis demonstrated the
power of meta-level reasoning in his PhD dissertation at Stanford. |
Late
70's |
Stanford's SUMEX-AIM resource,
headed by Ed Feigenbaum and Joshua Lederberg, demonstrates
the power of the ARPAnet for scientific collaboration. |
1978 |
Tom
Mitchell, at Stanford, invented the concept of Version
Spaces for describing the search space of a concept formation
program. |
|
Herb
Simon wins the Nobel Prize in Economics for his theory
of bounded rationality, one of the cornerstones of AI known
as "satisficing". |
|
The MOLGEN
program, written at Stanford by Mark Stefik and Peter Friedland,
demonstrated that an object-oriented representation
of knowledge can be used to plan gene-cloning experiments. |
1979 |
Bill VanMelle's PhD dissertation
at Stanford demonstrated the generality of MYCIN's representation
of knowledge and style of reasoning
in his EMYCIN program,
the model for many commercial expert
system "shells". |
|
Jack Myers and Harry Pople at
University of Pittsburgh developed INTERNIST,
a knowledge-based medical
diagnosis program based on Dr. Myers' clinical knowledge. |
|
Cordell Green, David Barstow,
Elaine Kant and others at Stanford demonstrated the CHI system
for automatic programming. |
|
The Stanford Cart, built by
Hans Moravec, becomes
the first computer-controlled, autonomous
vehicle when it successfully traverses a chair-filled
room and circumnavigates the Stanford AI Lab. |
|
Drew McDermott & Jon Doyle at
MIT, and John McCarthy at Stanford begin publishing work on
non-monotonic logics and formal
aspects of truth maintenance. |
1980's |
Lisp Machines
developed and marketed. |
|
First expert
system shells and commercial applications. |
1980 |
Lee Erman, Rick Hayes-Roth,
Victor Lesser and Raj Reddy published the first description
of the blackboard model, as the framework for the HEARSAY-II
speech understanding system. |
|
First
National Conference of the American Association of Artificial
Intelligence (AAAI) held at Stanford. |
1981 |
Danny
Hillis designs the connection machine, a massively parallel
architecture that brings new power to AI, and to computation
in general. (Later founds Thinking Machines, Inc.) |
1983
|
John Laird & Paul Rosenbloom,
working with Allen Newell, complete CMU dissertations on SOAR.
|
|
James Allen invents the Interval
Calculus, the first widely used formalization
of temporal events. |
Mid 80's |
Neural
Networks become widely used with the Backpropagation algorithm
(first described by Werbos in 1974). |
1985 |
The autonomous
drawing program, Aaron, created by Harold Cohen, is demonstrated
at the AAAI National Conference (based on more than a decade
of work, and with subsequent work showing major developments). |
1987 |
Marvin Minsky publishes
The Society of Mind,
a theoretical description of the mind as a collection of cooperating
agents. |
1989 |
Dean Pomerleau at
CMU creates ALVINN
(An Autonomous Land Vehicle in a Neural Network), which grew
into the system that drove a car coast-to-coast under computer
control for all but about 50 of the 2850 miles. |
1990's |
Major advances in
all areas of AI, with significant demonstrations in machine
learning, intelligent tutoring,
case-based reasoning, multi-agent
planning, scheduling,
uncertain reasoning, data
mining, natural language understanding
and translation, vision,
virtual reality, games, and
other topics. |
|
Rod
Brooks' COG Project at MIT, with numerous collaborators,
makes significant progress in building a humanoid
robot |
Early
90's |
TD-Gammon, a backgammon
program written by Gerry Tesauro, demonstrates that reinforcement
learning is powerful enough to create a championship-level
game-playing program by competing favorably with world-class
players. |
1997 |
The Deep Blue chess
program beats the current world chess champion, Garry
Kasparov, in a widely followed match. |
|
First official Robo-Cup
soccer match featuring table-top matches with 40 teams
of interacting robots and over 5000 spectators. |
Late
90's |
Web
crawlers and other AI-based information
extraction programs become essential in widespread use
of the world-wide-web. |
|
Demonstration of
an Intelligent Room and Emotional
Agents at MIT's AI Lab. Initiation of work on the Oxygen
Architecture, which connects mobile and stationary computers
in an adaptive network. |
2000 |
Interactive robot
pets (a.k.a. "smart toys") become commercially available,
realizing the vision of the 18th cen. novelty toy makers. |
|
Cynthia Breazeal
at MIT publishes her dissertation on Sociable Machines, describing
KISMET, a robot with
a face that expresses emotions. |
|
The Nomad
robot explores remote regions of Antarctica looking for meteorite
samples. |
Today |
See
AI in the news for
history in the making! |
SELECTED
REFERENCES
Buchanan, Bruce G. A (Very) Brief History of Artificial Intelligence. AI Magazine 26(4): Winter 2005, 53–60.
Cohen, Jonathan. Human Robots
in Myth and Science. NY: A.S.Barnes, 1967.
Feigenbaum, E.A. & Feldman, J. (eds.)
Computers and Thought. NY: McGraw-Hill, 1963.
Gardner, Martin. Logic Machines
& Diagrams. NY: McGraw-Hill, 1958.
McCorduck, Pamela. Machines Who
Think. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1979.
AAAI. AI Topics: History of AI
at www.aaai.org/aitopics/html/history.html
NOTE: A version of this timeline
appears in Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia, Ninth Edition.
Glenn D. Considine (ed.). New York: Wiley-Interscience, 2002.
Some of the Many Related
Pages in the AI Topics Web Site:
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