A Timeline of Artificial Intelligence - Part 1

Click here for the other decades | An appendix to the Bibliography on Mind
All of these events are explained in my book "Intelligence is not Artificial".

Slide presentation "AI and the Singularity"

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1909: Adolph Whitman's "Occultus" 1914: Leonardo Torres y Quevedo demonstrates his electromechanical chess-playing automaton 1928: David Hilbert "Entscheidungsproblem" or "decision problem" 1931: Kurt Goedel's self-referential formulas 1935: Alonzo Church proves the undecidability of first order logic 1936: Alan Turing's Universal Machine ("On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem") 1936: Alonzo Church's Lambda calculus 1941: Konrad Zuse's programmable computer 1943: Warren McCulloch's and Walter Pitts' binary neuron ("A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity") 1943: Emil Post's production rules 1943: Kenneth Craik's "The Nature of Explanation" 1943: "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" co-written by mathematician Norbert Wiener, physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth and engineer Julian Bigelow 1945: John Von Neumann publicizes the notion of a computer that holds its own instructions, the "stored-program architecture" 1946: The ENIAC computer 1946: The first Macy Conference on Cybernetics 1947: John Von Neumann's self-reproducing automata 1948: Norbert Wiener's "Cybernetics" 1948: Alan Turing's "Intelligent Machinery" 1949: Leon Dostert founds Georgetown University's Institute of Languages and Linguistics 1949: The Ratio Club 1949: William Grey-Walter's Elmer and Elsie robots 1949: Warren Weaver's "Translation" memorandum 1950: Claude Shannon's "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess" 1950: Alan Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (the "Turing Test") 1951: AI programs at Manchester on the Ferranti Mark: a draughts-playing program by Christopher Strachey; and a chess-playing program by Dietrich Prinz 1951: Conference on "Calculating Machines and Human Thought" in Paris 1951: Herbert Robbins' "stochastic gradient descent" method for optimization 1951: Karl Lashley's "The problem of serial order in behavior" 1951: Claude Shannon's maze-solving robots ("electronic rats") 1952: First International Conference on Machine Translation organized by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel 1952: Louis Couffignal's book "Thinking Machines" 1952: Ross Ashby's "Design for a Brain" 1953: Marshall Rosenbluth invents the "Metropolis algorithm", implemented by his wife Arianna, the first Markov Chain Monte Carlo method 1953: Harvey Chapman's "Garco" 1954: Zellig Harris' "Distributional Structure" (1954) 1954: Minsky's thesis on reinforcement learning "Theory of neural-analog reinforcement systems and its application to the brain-model problem" 1954: Demonstration of a machine-translation system by Leon Dostert's team at Georgetown University and Cuthbert Hurd's team at IBM, possibly the first non-numerical application of a digital computer 1954: Wesley Clark and Belmont Farley build the first computer simulation of a neural network 1955: The Western Joint Computer Conference with papers by Newell, Selfridge, Clark, etc 1955: Arthur Samuel's Checkers, the world's first self-learning program, and the first implementation of the alpha-beta algorithm 1956: Ray Solomonoff's inductive inference engine 1956: Gordon Pask builds the special-purpose electro-mechanical automata SAKI and Eucrates 1956: Dartmouth conference on Artificial Intelligence 1956: Allen Newell and Herbert Simon demonstrate the "Logic Theorist" 1957: Newell & Simon's "General Problem Solver" 1957: Richard Bellman's "Dynamic Programming" 1957: Frank Rosenblatt's Perceptron 1957: Noam Chomsky's "Syntactic Structures" (transformational grammar) 1958: Claus Scholz's robot MM7 1958: Oliver Selfridge's Pandemonium 1958: John McCarthy's LISP programming language 1958: John McCarthy's "Programs with Common Sense" focuses on knowledge representation 1958: Yehoshua Bar-Hillel's "proof" that machine translation is impossible without common-sense knowledge 1959: John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky found the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the MIT 1959: Noam Chomsky's review of a book by Burrhus Skinner ends the domination of behaviorism and resurrects cognitivism 1959: Zellig Harris' team develops the first parser 1959: Bernard Widrow's and Ted Hoff's Adaline (Adaptive Linear Neuron or later Adaptive Linear Element) that uses the delta rule for neural networks 1959: The industrial robot Unimate, developed by George Devol and Joseph Engelberger, is deployed at General Motors