Historical Background of AI

By mchukirr

  • Alan Turing (later designer of the Colossus computer that helped break the German Enigma code in World War II) writes On Computable Numbers in which suggest a universal machine that can do any calculation

  • JBM's Authur Samuel develops a checkers playing program that can learn from its mistakes

  • Norbert Weiner writes a book Cybernetics that gives its name to science; among other things he suggestd that the way of the brain is built may determine the way that it works and constructing machines like brains may help us to understand the brain

  • Turing suggests that machines might some day possess intelligence; he proposes the first test for possible machine intelligence (now called the Turing Test)

  • W. Grey Walter develops a 'tortoise' that moves under its own power until the batteries are low; it then seeks out and connects to the nearest power outlet and recharges itself (can this be described as hunger?)

  • John McCarthy of Dartmouth College (US) coins the terms artificial intelligence

  • LISP (LISt Processing) the most commonly used AI language is introduced by McCarthy

  • Dr Norbert Weiner suggests that computers that could think like humans would be "both effective, and dangerous"

  • Samuel beaten by his checkers playing program; others experiment into developing game playing theory

  • Dr Frank Rosenblatt demonstrates the perceptrons coupled to a simple nerial network cna be programmed by example to recognise visual patterns

  • Dr Weizenbaum of MIT designs ELIZA

  • fuzzy logic introduced by Zadeh to explain some of the situations where a Yes/No answer will not suffice

  • Work begun on DENDRAL, the first expert system

  • Minsky and Papert prove perceptrons cannot be used as the basis for a general computer effectively ending research in neural networks for 15 years

  • Shakey, a radio linked, mobile robot with built in TV and range finder is developed to manipulate blocks using a programm called STRIPS that could "plan" a series of actions

  • Terry Winograd at MIT develops SHRUDLI , an NL interface to an imaginary 'block world' that was the first to demonstrate that a machine could have any real graso of language

  • the AI language PROLOG (programmed logic) developed

  • MYCIN, an expert system to diagnose bacterial infections is produced

  • Hearsay, a speech understanding program is introduced

  • work starts on Shear Magic, a sheep sheerinng robot (WA)

  • BKG 9.8. a backgammon playing program defeats the (human) world champion

  • developements in knowledge engineering and inference systems helps respark the interest in the potential for AI

  • Japan

    Japan announces the $M400 Fifth Generation Project to, over 10 years, put a core computer in every home and small business; this knowledge information processor (KIP) would work through a natural language interface; the overall aim was to establish a knowledge industry because the Japanese saw knowledge as the new wealth in a post-industrial society. (As a side note: tthe Japanese Fifth Generation Project was one of the motivating factors behind the move to develop IPT as a subjext in Queensland

  • Q & A, a natural language based PC database program is introduced

  • developments with ANNs lead to a significant advances into solving problems associated with pattern matching

  • US military use AI based technology in weapons systems such as missiles and jet fighters

  • voice and character recognition used in home computers

  • ALICE, an open source NL AI a chat robot, wins the Loebner Prize for the Turing Test.

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