-
Konrad Zuse built the first working program-controlled computers
-
Period: to
artificial intelligence
-
Warren Sturgis McCulloch and Walter Pitts publish "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" (1943), laying foundations for artificial neural networks.
-
Game theory
which would prove invaluable in the progress of AI was introduced with the 1944 paper, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by mathematician John von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern. -
John von Neumann Church-Turing thesis
in response to a comment at a lecture that it was impossible for a machine to think: "You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you will tell me precisely what it is that a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that!". Von Neumann was presumably alluding to the Church-Turing thesis which states that any effective procedure can be simulated by a (generalized) computer. -
Alan Turing the turning test
proposes the Turing Test as a measure of machine intelligence -
Isaac Asimov, Three Laws of Robotics.
Isaac Asimov published his Three Laws of Robotics. -
Arthur Samuel
wrote the first game-playing program, for checkers ), to achieve sufficient skill to challenge a respectable amateur. His first checkers-playing program was written in 1952, and in 1955 he created a version that learned to play -
Dartmouth College summer AI conference
The first Dartmouth College summer AI conference is organized by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathan Rochester of IBM and Claude Shannon. -
Logic Theorist
The first demonstration of the Logic Theorist (LT) written by Allen Newell, J.C. Shaw and Herbert Simon (Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University). This is often called the first AI program, though Samuel's checkers program also has a strong claim. -
General Problem Solver
The General Problem Solver (GPS) demonstrated by Newell, Shaw and Simon. -
Lisp programming language.
John McCarthy (Massachusetts Institute of Technology or MIT) invented the Lisp programming language. -
semantic nets for machine translation.
Margaret Masterman and colleagues at University of Cambridge design semantic nets for machine translation. -
the first symbolic integration program
James Slagle (PhD dissertation, MIT) wrote (in Lisp) the first symbolic integration program, SAINT, which solved calculus problems at the college freshman level. -
denied the possibility of machine intelligence on logical or philosophical grounds
In Minds, Machines and Gödel, John Lucas denied the possibility of machine intelligence on logical or philosophical grounds. He referred to Kurt Gödel's result of 1931: sufficiently powerful formal systems are either inconsistent or allow for formulating true theorems unprovable by any theorem-proving AI deriving all provable theorems from the axioms. Since humans are able to "see" the truth of such theorems, machines were deemed inferior. -
First industrial robot company, Unimation, founded.
First industrial robot company, Unimation, founded. -
Thomas Evans' program, ANALOGY
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. -
Leonard Uhr and Charles Vossler
Leonard Uhr and Charles Vossler published "A Pattern Recognition Program That Generates, Evaluates, and Adjusts Its Own Operators", which described one of the first machine learning programs that could adaptively acquire and modify features and thereby overcome the limitations of simple perceptrons of Rosenblatt -
mechanical proof procedure
J. Alan Robinson invented a mechanical proof procedure, the Resolution Method, which allowed programs to work efficiently with formal logic as a representation language. -
the first expert system
Edward Feigenbaum initiated Dendral, a ten-year effort to develop software to deduce the molecular structure of organic compounds using scientific instrument data. It was the first expert system. -
Patrick Winston's PhD program, ARCH,
Patrick Winston's PhD program, ARCH, at MIT learned concepts from examples in the world of children's blocks. -
Version Spaces for describing the search space
Tom Mitchell, at Stanford, invented the concept of Version Spaces for describing the search space of a concept formation program. -
artificial intelligence is used for the first time as the topic of the second Dartmouth Conference
The name artificial intelligence is used for the first time as the topic of the second Dartmouth Conference, organized by John McCarthy -
bounded rationality
Herbert Simon wins the Nobel Prize in Economics for his theory of bounded rationality, one of the cornerstones of AI known as "satisficing".
