1914 The Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres y Quevedo demonstrates the first chess-playing machine, capable of king and rook against king endgames without any human intervention.
1921 Czech writer Karel Čapek introduces the word "robot" in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). The word "robot" comes from the word "robota" (work).
1925 Houdina Radio Control releases a radio-controlled driverless car, travelling the streets of New York City.
1927 The science-fiction film Metropolis is released. It features a robot double of a peasant girl, Maria, which unleashes chaos in Berlin of 2026—it was the first robot depicted on film, inspiring the Art Deco look of C-3PO in Star Wars.
1929 Makoto Nishimura designs Gakutensoku, Japanese for "learning from the laws of nature," the first robot built in Japan. It could change its facial expression and move its head and hands via an air pressure mechanism.
1943 Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts publish “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity” in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics. This influential paper, in which they discussed networks of idealized and simplified artificial “neurons” and how they might perform simple logical functions, will become the inspiration for computer-based “neural networks” (and later “deep learning”) and their popular description as “mimicking the brain.”
1949 Edmund Berkeley publishes Giant Brains: Or Machines That Think in which he writes: “Recently there have been a good deal of news about strange giant machines that can handle information with vast speed and skill….These machines are similar to what a brain would be if it were made of hardware and wire instead of flesh and nerves… A machine can handle information; it can calculate, conclude, and choose; it can perform reasonable operations with information. A machine, therefore, can think.”
1949 Donald Hebb publishes Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory in which he proposes a theory about learning based on conjectures regarding neural networks and the ability of synapses to strengthen or weaken over time.
1950 Claude Shannon’s “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess” is the first published article on developing a chess-playing computer program.
1950 Alan Turing publishes “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” in which he proposes “the imitation game” which will later become known as the “Turing Test.”
1951 Marvin Minsky and Dean Edmunds build SNARC (Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator), the first artificial neural network, using 3000 vacuum tubes to simulate a network of 40 neurons.
1952 Arthur Samuel develops the first computer checkers-playing program and the first computer program to learn on its own.
August 31, 1955 The term “artificial intelligence” is coined in a proposal for a “2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence” submitted by John McCarthy (Dartmouth College), Marvin Minsky (Harvard University), Nathaniel Rochester (IBM), and Claude Shannon (Bell Telephone Laboratories). The workshop, which took place a year later, in July and August 1956, is generally considered as the official birthdate of the new field.
December 1955 Herbert Simon and Allen Newell develop the Logic Theorist, the first artificial intelligence program, which eventually would prove 38 of the first 52 theorems in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica.
1957 Frank Rosenblatt develops the Perceptron, an early artificial neural network enabling pattern recognition based on a two-layer computer learning network. The New York Times reported the Perceptron to be "the embryo of an electronic computer that [the Navy] expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence." The New Yorker called it a “remarkable machine… capable of what amounts to thought.”
1958 John McCarthy develops programming language Lisp which becomes the most popular programming language used in artificial intelligence research.
1959 Arthur Samuel coins the term “machine learning,” reporting on programming a computer “so that it will learn to play a better game of checkers than can be played by the person who wrote the program.”
1959 Oliver Selfridge publishes “Pandemonium: A paradigm for learning” in the Proceedings of the Symposium on Mechanization of Thought Processes, in which he describes a model for a process by which computers could recognize patterns that have not been specified in advance.
1959 John McCarthy publishes “Programs with Common Sense” in the Proceedings of the Symposium on Mechanization of Thought Processes, in which he describes the Advice Taker, a program for solving problems by manipulating sentences in formal languages with the ultimate objective of making programs “that learn from their experience as effectively as humans do.”
1961 The first industrial robot, Unimate, starts working on an assembly line in a General Motors plant in New Jersey.
1961 James Slagle develops SAINT (Symbolic Automatic INTegrator), a heuristic program that solved symbolic integration problems in freshman calculus.
1964 Daniel Bobrow completes his MIT PhD dissertation titled “Natural Language Input for a Computer Problem Solving System” and develops STUDENT, a natural language understanding computer program.
1965 Herbert Simon predicts that "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do."
1965 Hubert Dreyfus publishes "Alchemy and AI," arguing that the mind is not like a computer and that there were limits beyond which AI would not progress.
1965 I.J. Good writes in "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine" that “the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.”
1965 Joseph Weizenbaum develops ELIZA, an interactive program that carries on a dialogue in English language on any topic. Weizenbaum, who wanted to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between man and machine, was surprised by the number of people who attributed human-like feelings to the computer program.
1965 Edward Feigenbaum, Bruce G. Buchanan, Joshua Lederberg, and Carl Djerassi start working on DENDRAL at Stanford University. The first expert system, it automated the decision-making process and problem-solving behavior of organic chemists, with the general aim of studying hypothesis formation and constructing models of empirical induction in science.
1966 Shakey the robot is the first general-purpose mobile robot to be able to reason about its own actions. In a Life magazine 1970 article about this “first electronic person,” Marvin Minsky is quoted saying with “certitude”: “In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.”
1968 The film 2001: Space Odyssey is released, featuring Hal, a sentient computer.
1968 Terry Winograd develops SHRDLU, an early natural language understanding computer program.
1969 Arthur Bryson and Yu-Chi Ho describe backpropagation as a multi-stage dynamic system optimization method. A learning algorithm for multi-layer artificial neural networks, it has contributed significantly to the success of deep learning in the 2000s and 2010s, once computing power has sufficiently advanced to accommodate the training of large networks.
1969 Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert publish Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry, highlighting the limitations of simple neural networks. In an expanded edition published in 1988, they responded to claims that their 1969 conclusions significantly reduced funding for neural network research: “Our version is that progress had already come to a virtual halt because of the lack of adequate basic theories… by the mid-1960s there had been a great many experiments with perceptrons, but no one had been able to explain why they were able to recognize certain kinds of patterns and not others.”
1970 The first anthropomorphic robot, the WABOT-1, is built at Waseda University in Japan. It consisted of a limb-control system, a vision system and a conversation system.
1972 MYCIN, an early expert system for identifying bacteria causing severe infections and recommending antibiotics, is developed at Stanford University.
1973 James Lighthill reports to the British Science Research Council on the state artificial intelligence research, concluding that "in no part of the field have discoveries made so far produced the major impact that was then promised," leading to drastically reduced government support for AI research.
1976 Computer scientist Raj Reddy publishes “Speech Recognition by Machine: A Review” in the Proceedings of the IEEE, summarizing the early work on Natural Language Processing (NLP).
1978 The XCON (eXpert CONfigurer) program, a rule-based expert system assisting in the ordering of DEC's VAX computers by automatically selecting the components based on the customer's requirements, is developed at Carnegie Mellon University.
1979 The Stanford Cart successfully crosses a chair-filled room without human intervention in about five hours, becoming one of the earliest examples of an autonomous vehicle.
1980 Wabot-2 is built at Waseda University in Japan, a musician humanoid robot able to communicate with a person, read a musical score and play tunes of average difficulty on an electronic organ.
1981 The Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry budgets $850 million for the Fifth Generation Computer project. The project aimed to develop computers that could carry on conversations, translate languages, interpret pictures, and reason like human beings.
1984 Electric Dreams is released, a film about a love triangle between a man, a woman and a personal computer.
1984 At the annual meeting of AAAI, Roger Schank and Marvin Minsky warn of the coming “AI Winter,” predicting an immanent bursting of the AI bubble (which did happen three years later), similar to the reduction in AI investment and research funding in the mid-1970s.
1986 First driverless car, a Mercedes-Benz van equipped with cameras and sensors, built at Bundeswehr University in Munich under the direction of Ernst Dickmanns, drives up to 55 mph on empty streets.
October 1986 David Rumelhart, Geoffrey Hinton, and Ronald Williams publish ”Learning representations by back-propagating errors,” in which they describe “a new learning procedure, back-propagation, for networks of neurone-like units.”
1987 The video Knowledge Navigator, accompanying Apple CEO John Sculley’s keynote speech at Educom, envisions a future in which “knowledge applications would be accessed by smart agents working over networks connected to massive amounts of digitized information.”
1988 Judea Pearl publishes Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems. His 2011 Turing Award citation reads: “Judea Pearl created the representational and computational foundation for the processing of information under uncertainty. He is credited with the invention of Bayesian networks, a mathematical formalism for defining complex probability models, as well as the principal algorithms used for inference in these models. This work not only revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence but also became an important tool for many other branches of engineering and the natural sciences.”
1989 Yann LeCun and other researchers at AT&T Bell Labs successfully apply a backpropagation algorithm to a multi-layer neural network, recognizing handwritten ZIP codes. Given the hardware limitations at the time, it took about 3 days (still a significant improvement over earlier efforts) to train the network.
1990 Rodney Brooks publishes “Elephants Don’t Play Chess,” proposing a new approach to AI—building intelligent systems, specifically robots, from the ground up and on the basis of ongoing physical interaction with the environment: “The world is its own best model… The trick is to sense it appropriately and often enough.”
1993 Vernor Vinge publishes “The Coming Technological Singularity,” in which he predicts that “within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”
1995 Richard Wallace develops the chatbot A.L.I.C.E (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity), inspired by Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA program, but with the addition of natural language sample data collection on an unprecedented scale, enabled by the advent of the Web.
1997 Sepp Hochreiter and Jürgen Schmidhuber propose Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), a type of a recurrent neural network used today in handwriting recognition and speech recognition.
1997 Deep Blue becomes the first computer chess-playing program to beat a reigning world chess champion.
1998 Dave Hampton and Caleb Chung create Furby, the first domestic or pet robot.
1998 Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio and others publish papers on the application of neural networks to handwriting recognition and on optimizing backpropagation.
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