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AI timeline

For a general overview of AI, I recommend this coffeetable book: Raymond Kurzweil's "The Age of Intelligent Machines", MIT Press, 1990, 565 pages, ISBN 0-262-11121-7, $39.95.

Timeline

The following timeline is based mostly on "The Brain Makers" by H.P. Newquist (ISBN 0-672-30412-0), and some Kurzweil:

1000BCE: I Ching
300BCE: Aristotle, Euclid
1617: John Napier's "Napier's Bones"
1642: Blaise Pascal's Pascaline (automatic calculating machine)
1694: Liebnitz's "Computer" can do multiplication
1725: Vico's "New Science" calls for universal thesaurus of concepts
1822: Babbage's Difference Engine (not completed)
1832: Babbage's Analytic Engine (never built)
1847: Boole's symbolic logic
1852: Roget's Thesaurus
1873: Dewey Decimal System
1890: Hollerith's punched-card computer
1900: Polti's "36 Dramatic Situations"
1922: James Joyce's "Ulysses"
1939: Joyce's "Finnegans Wake"
1940: First electronic computers in US, UK, and Germany
1946: ENIAC
1950: Alan Turing "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
1953: Shannon gives Minsky and McCarthy summer jobs at Bell Labs
1956: Rockefeller funds M&M's AI conference at Dartmouth
1956: CIA funds GAT machine-translation project
1956: Newell, Shaw, and Simon's Logic Theorist
1957: Newell, Shaw, and Simon's General Problem Solver
1958: McCarthy creates first LISP
1959: M&M establish MIT AI Lab
1959: Frank Rosenblatt introduces Perceptron
1960: Bar-Hillel deflates dreams of easy machine translation
1962: First industrial robots
1962: McCarthy moves to Stanford, creates Stanford AI Lab in '63
1963: Quillian lays groundwork for semantic nets
1963: ARPA gives $2 million grant to MIT AI Lab
1964: Bobrow's "Student" solves math word-problems
1965: Feigenbaum takes over SAIL; Noftsker takes over MIT AI Lab
1965: Feigenbaum and Lederberg begin DENDRAL expert system project
1966: Weizenbaum and Colby create ELIZA
1966: ALPAC report kills funding for machine translation
1967: Greenblatt's MacHack defeats Hubert Deyfus at chess
1969: Minsky & Papert's "Perceptrons" kills funding for neural net research
1969: Kubrick's "2001" introduces AI to mass audience
1970: Terry Winograd's SHRDLU, minor NLP success
1970: Colmerauer creates PROLOG
1972: DARPA cancels funding for robotics at Stanford (Shakey)
1973: Lighthill report kills AI funding in UK
1973: LOGO funding scandal: Minsky & Papert turn MIT lab over to Winston
1974: Edward Shortliffe's thesis on MYCIN
1974: Minsky reifies the 'frame'
1976: DARPA cancels funding for speech understanding research
1976: Greenblatt creates first LISP machine, "CONS"
1976: Doug Lenat's AM (Automated Mathematician)
1976: Marr's "primal sketch" improves computer vision
1978: Marr & Nishihara's "2.5-D sketch"
1978: SRI's PROSPECTOR discovers molybdenum vein
1978: Patrick Hayes' "Naive Physics Manifesto"
1980: First AAAI conference at Stanford
1980: McDermott's XCON for configuring VAX systems
1981: Kazuhiro Fuchi announces Japanese Fifth Generation Project
1982: John Hopfield resuscitates neural nets
1983: MCC consortium formed under Bobby Ray Inman
1983: DARPA's Stategic Computing Initiative commits $600 million over 5 yrs
1984: Austin AAAI conference launches AI into financial spotlight
1984: Doug Lenat begins CYC project at MCC
1984-86: Corporations invest some $50 million in AI startups
1985: GM and Campbell's Soup find expert systems don't need LISP machines
1986: Thinking Machines Inc introduces Connection Machine
1987: "AI Winter" sets in
1987: Bottom drops out of LISP-machine market due to saturation
1988: AI revenues reach $1 billion
1988: The 386 chip brings PC speeds into competition with LISP machines
1988: Schank forced to resign from Yale and Cognitive Systems
1990: MacArthur Foundation gives Richard Stallman $240,000 genius grant
1992: Japanese Fifth Generation Project ends with a whimper
1992: Japanese Real World Computing Project begins with a big-money bang
1985-present: many other expert-systems success stories



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