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Evolution of artificial neurons by Warren McCulloch, an American neuroanatomist, psychiatrist and cybernetic, and Walter Pitts , an American logical and cognitive scientist. -
Donald Hebb, a Canadian psychologist, demonstrated an updating rule for modifying the connection strength between neurons. His rule is now called Hebbian learning. -
In 1950, the mathematician Alan Turing published a paper entitled “Computing Machinery, and Intelligence” in which he posed the question “Do computers have the capacity to think?” and proposed a test to determine the answer. The test required a computer to imitate spoken conversational human language, which was indistinguishable from human speech. Although Turing presents arguments against this test’s assumption, a computer that passed the test would be classified as able to think. -
The Dartmouth conference was co-hosted by John McCarthy & Marvin Minsky with the goal of having a lively discussion about AI. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way, but it was still a major event in the history of AI and it was the first time the term "artificial intelligence" and "ai" were used. -
At the Dartmouth conference, the word “Artificial Intelligence” was first adopted by American computer scientist John McCarthy -
About five years after the publication of Turing’s paper, Newell and his colleague Herbert Simon developed a computer program called “Logic Theorist,” which simulates human problem solving capabilities. This program was funded by the National Endowment for Artificial Intelligence and was also featured in Dartmouth’s Artificial Intelligence Summer Research Project. -
Edward Feigenbaum became the father of expert systems due to his research at Stanford University from 1965 to 1982. Expert systems are AI programs that mimic decision-making for a very specific domain of information, such as medical diagnosis, or chemistry properties. The first expert system was created by Feigenbaum and his colleagues. It was called the DENDRAL project. -
Backpropagation is a method of strengthening and weakening the synapses in a neural network, which allows for basic, controlled learning. However, it was hard to use, due to the limited processing power of computers -
Joseph Weizenbaum created the First Chatbot, named Eliza, that is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. -
Many translation tools began their development in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Beginning as a dictionary-based tool created by Peter Toma in 1968, SYSTRAN, which stands for "System Translation," has become a premier translating service. Watch a video produced for their 50th anniversary here. -
In 1974, he founded a company called Kurzweil Computer Products. Two years later, he introduced the Kurzweil Reading Machine, a novel device that combined three inventions: the first charge coupled device (C.C.D.) flatbed scanner, the first optical character recognition (O.C.R.) -
NETtalk is an AI program that was created to map the patterns of English text input and phonetic transcriptions to be a text-to-speech program. The program could not visually detect text on its own, but it did demonstrate AI pattern recognition and ability. -
1997
Chess Champion
By the end of the 1990's AI is sophisticated enough to beat chess masters at their own game. World chess champion Gary Kasparov was beat by IBM's Deep Blue chess-playing program. This was a large accomplishment towards showing the decision-making capabilities of AI computer systems. Watch a short video about Deep Blue's win here. -
In the same year that Deep Blue beat the chess grand master, Windows implemented a speech recognition program in their software. Created by Dragon Naturally Speaking, the program was an early speech-to-text tool. -
For a machine to truly be able to think like a human, it should be able to understand human emotion. Cynthia Breazeal created the robot Kismet to be socially intelligent. The robot responds to stimuli and can communicate various emotions. The algorithm also allows the robot to learn from its mistakes. Watch a video featuring Breazeal and Kismet here. -
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) issued a challenge in the early 21st century to create a self-driving vehicle that could travel unknown terrain for several miles. During the first challenge in 2004, no robots could complete the course. In the repeated challenge in 2005, 23 vehicles raced, but only 5 finished the course. Stanford's robot "Stanley" finished first and won the $2 million prize. -
Apple launches it's newer phones with an AI assistant named Siri that can help do menial tasks such as gather information from the internet or make phone calls. -
Watson, IBM's AI software developed to gather information about many different topics and predict the answer to questions on the game show, Jeopardy, wins a match. -
ChatGPT is OpenAI’s newest advancement in language AI. It acts in a conversational way to answer a prompt or create a textual form. ChatGPT recognizes patterns from internet data and past chat answers to create acceptable answer input for the user. The chatbot has excited and scared the world simultaneously. -
Google and DeepMind release a chatbot called Google bard to the public.