Skip to content
Curated playlist

History of artificial intelligence

  • Strategic Computing InitiativeFrom 1983 to 1993, the U.S. Defense Department spent one billion dollars trying to build a machine that could think.
  • Lighthill reportThe British government used the 1973 Lighthill report to withdraw support for AI research at most universities.
  • Logic TheoristHerbert Simon tested Logic Theorist with index cards at home. His family and students played its parts.
  • SHRDLUSHRDLU, a conversational program from the late 1960s, once ended a long run of questions with a line that sounds almost like a shrug: 'BECAUSE YOU ASKED ME TO.' The question that drew it out was 'Why did you do that?' It was the last of…
  • Computing Machinery and IntelligenceIn 1950, Alan Turing replaced the question "Can machines think?" with a game. The paper appeared in the journal Mind.
  • Darwin among the MachinesIn 1863, a letter signed Cellarius asked if machines were alive and evolving. Samuel Butler wrote it.
  • AI boomMore than a thousand British musicians released an album of complete silence to protest AI training.
  • History of artificial intelligenceIn 1956, a Dartmouth College workshop gave artificial intelligence its name. John McCarthy coined the term there.
  • AI winterIn 1984, two AI pioneers warned that an AI winter was coming. Three years later, the industry began to collapse.
  • Dartmouth workshopJohn McCarthy chose the name "artificial intelligence" partly to avoid cybernetics and its famous champion.
  • Turing testAlan Turing set aside "Can machines think?" as too slippery to define and swapped in a test.
  • Frame (artificial intelligence)A boy kicks a ball. Most people hearing that sentence picture a particular ball, probably a familiar soccer ball, rather than an abstract ball with no attributes. Frames in artificial intelligence were built on that habit of mind. Marvin…
  • Microelectronics and Computer Technology CorporationA former NSA director was chosen to lead a U.S. computer research consortium. Bobby Ray Inman founded MCC in late 1982.

Queue