While there have been significant advancements in the field of AI in recent years, the quest to build automatons with an agency is something that mankind has been pursuing quite a while. In this feature, we highlight select events from the past to generate a brief timeline of artificial intelligence. Since it is impossible to list all of the events that have led to where we are today, we have tried to include those that were most interesting and significant in our opinion.
Antiquity
Greek myths of Pygmalion and Hephaestus implemented the idea of artificial beings such as Pandora and Galatea and intelligent robots such as Talos.
1206
Ibrahim Al-Jazari, father of robotics, created a programmable orchestra of mechanical beings.
1614
Thomas Hobbes, an English author published the book Leviathan in which he discussed the age of mechanical reproduction and a social cognitive theory.
1726
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift describes an Engine, “a Project for improving speculative Knowledge by practical and mechanical Operations “
1818
Frankenstein published by Mary Shelley discusses the ethics of Artificial Intelligence.
1863
According to Samuel Butler, Darwinian evolution appliesnetwork-basedthe to machines such that they become conscious.
1898
Nikola Tesla made a demonstration of the world’s first radio-controlled vessel at an electrical exhibition in recently completed Madison Square Garden.
1913
Principia Mathematica published by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead discusses the transformation of formal logic.
1923
The word “robot” was first time used in English in the play Rossum’s Universal Robots by Czech playwright Karel Capek’s that opened in London.
1925
A radio-controlled driverless car was released by Houdina Radio Control.
1927
A film Metropolis was released that was the first one to depict a robot.
1929
Ko Nishimura, a Japanese professor designed the first Japanese robot, Gakutensoku. The robot could move its head and hands and change its facial expressions.
1931
Kurt Gödel, the father of theoretical computer science built an integer-based programming language.
1943
Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch laid the foundation of artificial neural networks and published “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity”
1943-45
Norbert Wiener investigated information theory and invented the Wiener filter. He also worked on automatic anti-aircraft guns.
1949
An American computer scientist, Edmund Berkeley published Giant Brains: Or Machines That Think, which popularized cognitive images of early computers.
1950
Alan Turing, a British mathematician, proposed the Turing Test as a measure of machine intelligence.
1950
Claude Shannon published the first article “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess” on developing a chess-playing computer program.
1950
Isaac Asimov published “Three Laws of Robotics”.
1951
Dean Edmunds and Marvin Minsky built the first artificial neural network, SNARC (Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator).
1952
Arthur Samuel developed the first computer checkers-playing program.
1955
John McCarthy, Nathaniel Rochester, Marvin Minsky, and Claude Shannon coined the term “artificial intelligence”.
Dec 1955
Logic Theorist, the first AI program was developed by Alan Newell and Herbert Simon.
1957
Perceptron, a two-layered computer learning network based artificial neural network was developed by Frank Rosenblatt.
1958
Lisp, a programming language developed by John McCarthy is used in AI research.
1959
Arthur Samuel, a pioneer in the field of ML, coined the term “machine learning”.
1959
Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, and John Shaw created a General Problem Solver (GPS) while at CMU.
1959
Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy founded the MIT AI Lab.
1960
Ray Solomonoff laid foundation of the mathematical theory of AI and introduced Bayesian methods for inductive inference and prediction.
1961
Unimate, the first industrial robot was introduced that worked on an assembly line in a General Motors plant in New Jersey.
1963
Julian Feldman and Edward Feigenbaum published the first collection of AI articles, Computer and Thought.
1963
Leonard Uhr and Charles Vossler published one of the first ML programs, a pattern recognition program that generates, evaluates, and adjusts its canmachine-learnedoperators
1964
STUDENT, a natural language understanding computer program was developed by Daniel Bobrow.
1965
ELIZA, a natural language processing computer program developed by Joseph Weizenbaum carries on a dialogue in the English language.
1966
Shakey, the first general-purpose mobile robot that reasons about its own actions. It analyzes commands and breaks them down to perform larger tasks.
1968
MacHack, a knowledge-based chess-playing program was built by Richard Greenblatt (MIT).
1968-2021
Space Odyssey, a film was released that featured a sentient computer, HAL.
1968
Terry Winograd develops SHRDLU, an early natural language comprehension computer program.
1969
Seymour Papert and Marvin Minsky published Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry, which features the limitations of simple neural networks.
1970
WABOT-1, the first anthropomorphic robot was built at Waseda University, Japan. It consisted of a limb-control, vision, and conversation system.
1972
Stanford University developed an expert system, MYCIN, that identifies infection causing bacteria and recommends antibiotics.
1980
Waseda University, Japan built a musician humanoid robot, Wabot-2 that is able to read a musical store, play easy tunes on an electronic organ, and communicate with a person.
1981
$850 million was budgeted by the Japanese Government for the Fifth Generation Computer Project, which aims to create computers that are capable of AI.
To be Continued…
