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WW2 triggers fresh thinking
Alan Turing invents the Turing Test, which set the bar for an intelligent machine: a computer that could fool someone into thinking they were talking to another person. -
Science fiction steers the conversation
I Robot was published – a collection of short stories by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. -
A 'top-down' approach
The term 'artificial intelligence' was coined for a summer conference at Dartmouth University, organised by a young computer scientist, John McCarthy. Top scientists debated how to tackle AI. Some, like influential academic Marvin Minsky, favored a top-down approach: pre-programming a computer with the rules that govern human behavior. Others preferred a bottom-up approach, such as neural networks that simulated brain cells and learned new behaviors. -
2001: A Space Odyssey – imagining where AI could lead
Minsky influenced science fiction too. He advised Stanley Kubrick on the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, featuring an intelligent computer, HAL 9000. -
Tough problems to crack
AI was lagging far behind the lofty predictions made by advocates like Minsky – something made apparent by Shakey the Robot. -
The AI winter
By the early 1970s AI was in trouble. Millions had been spent, with little to show for it. Funding for the industry was slashed, ushering in what became known as the AI winter -
A solution for big business
The moment that historians pinpoint as the end of the AI winter was when AI's commercial value started to be realized, attracting new investment. -
Rodney Brooks published a new paper: Elephants Don’t Play Chess.
Supporters of top-down AI still had their champions: supercomputers like Deep Blue, which in 1997 took on world chess champion Garry Kasparov. -
The first robot for the home
Rodney Brook's spin-off company, iRobot, created the first commercially successful robot for the home – an autonomous vacuum cleaner called Roomba. -
War machines
Having seen their dreams of AI in the Cold War come to nothing, the US military was now getting back on board with this new approach. They began to invest in autonomous robots. -
Starting to crack the big problems
Google voice recognition
According to Google, its speech recognition technology had an 8% word error rate as of 2015. In November 2008, a small feature appeared on the new Apple iPhone – a Google app with speech recognition. -
Dance bots
At the same time as massive mainframes were changing the way AI was done, new technology meant smaller computers could also pack a bigger punch.
At Shanghai's 2010 World Expo, some of the extraordinary capabilities of these robots went on display, as 20 of them danced in perfect harmony for eight minutes -
Man vs machine: Fight of the 21st Century
In 2011, IBM's Watson took on the human brain on US quiz show Jeopardy. -
Are machines intelligent now?
Sixty-four years after Turing published his idea of a test that would prove machine intelligence, a chatbot called Eugene Goostman finally passed.
From Google's billion dollar investment in driverless cars, to Skype's launch of real-time voice translation, intelligent machines were now becoming an everyday reality that would change all of our lives
