| 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. (See Carl
Hewitt's history of logic programming).
|
| 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.
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