History of Artificial Intelligence

When we talk about Artificial intelligence, we think its a new concept and not even 100 years old. But this is not true. If you will trace the history, you will find that AI has been part of our intellectual society way before one can think.

But you don’t have to dig into history, we have already done that for you. In this article we are sharing you a timeline of the history of AI starting from its first mention.

1308: Ramon Llull

Ramon Llull was a Catalan poet and a theologian who in 1308 published a Ars generalis ultima (The Ultimate General Art). This can be seen as the first-ever attempt to create the concept of probability. The work of Roman further influenced Pascal and Leibniz which ultimately leads to the rise of probability theory.


1666: Gottfried Leibniz

Gottfried Leibniz was a mathematician and philosopher who got inspired by the work of Roman Llull and in 1666 published Dissertatio de arte combinatoria (On the Combinatorial Art). Here he proposed that human thoughts and ideas are simply a combination of a small number of concepts and nothing more.


1726: Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift is one of the most famous writers for his work Gulliver’s Travels. But can you imagine he plays a very important role in the evolution of artificial intelligence. In his book Gulliver’s Travels, he described a machine on the island of Laputa by the name of “The Engine” If you will Google the image of that engine, it will be very much like the modern day’s processors.


1763: Thomas Bayes

In 1763, Thomas Bayes developed Bayesian Inference which was the first framework for Machine Learning. Here he described the probability of events.


1854: George Boole

George Boole was a self-taught English mathematician, philosopher, and logician. in 1854 he came up with an idea that logical reasoning can be performed in the same way as solving equations.


1898: Nicola Tesla

In 1898 the most revolutionary inventor of 19th and 20th century Nikola Tesla demonstrated the world’s first radio-controlled vessel. it was a boat that Tesla referred to as having a borrowed mind.


1914: Leonardo Torres y Quevedo

Leonardo Torres y Quevedo was a Spanish Engineer who in 1914 demonstrated a machine capable of playing chess without any human intervention.


1921: Karel Čapek

In 1921, world first came to know about Robots. A Czech writer Karel Čapek introduced the word ROBOT in his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots).


1925: Driverless Cars

In 1925, the world saw the first driverless car. On the streets of New York, Houdina Radio Control releases the world’s first radio-controlled driverless car.


1927: Metropolis

In 1927, the world’s first science fiction movie Metropolis was released. This movie featured a Robot. This movie was the inspiration behind Art Deco look of C-3PO in Star Wars.


1929: Makoto Nishimura

Makoto Nishimura was a Japanes Biologist. He invented Gakutensoku, Japan’s first functional robot. Gakutensoku was capable of changing its facial expressions and could move its head and hand via a pressure mechanism.


1943: Artificial Neurons

In 1943 Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts published a paper in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics. The title of that paper was “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity”. In this paper, they talked about the idealized and simplified artificial neurons. Their work further becomes the backbone of computer-based neural networks.


1949: Edmund Berkeley

In 1949, Edmund Berkeley who was an American Computer Scientist and co-founded the Association for Computing Machinery published Giant Brains: Or the Machines That Think. In his publication, he compares the computer with the human brain and concluded that both are the same in all aspects.


1950: Alan Turing

In 1950, Alan Turing published Computing Machinery and Intelligence. his work further becomes the “Turning Test”.


1952: Arthur Samuel

In 1952, Arthur Samuel who was pioneer in the field of computer gaming, developed the first computer program which was capable of learning by its own.


August 31st, 1955: Artificial Intelligence

On August 31st, 1955 John McCarthy along with Nathaniel Rochester, Marvin Minsky, and Claude Shannon coined the term Artificial Intelligence.


December 1955: Logic Theorist

In December 1955, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell developed the first artificial intelligence program by the name of Logic Theorist.


1957: Perceptron

In 1957. Frank Rosenblatt developed the earl stage artificial intelligence neural network by the name Perceptron. In The New York Times, Perceptron was reported as “the embryo of an electronic computer that [the Navy] expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence.”


1958: LISP

In 1958, John McCarthy who coined the term Artificial Intelligence, developed the LISP programming language which went on to becoming the most popular language in AI research.


1961: Unimate

In 1961, the first industrial robot by the name of Unimate started working in General Motors Plant in New Jersey.


1965: E.L.I.Z.A.

In 1965, Joseph Weizenbaum invented E.L.I.Z.A. ELIZA was able to talk in English on any topic. People were surprised to see that ELIZA was able to showcase human-like feelings.


1968: 2001 Space Odyssey

In 1968, the most influential movie 2001 Space Odyssey was released. In that movie Hal a sentient computer was featured.


1976: Raj Reddy

In 1976, a computer scientist Raj Reddy published his work on NLP by the title Speech Recognition by Machine.


1981: Fifth Generation Computer

In 1981, the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry signed a budget of $850 million for the development of Fifth Generation Computers. The objective was to develop computers that can be like humans.


1988: Jabberwacky

In 1988 Rollo Carpenter developed the first chat-bot by the name of Jabberwacky. The chatbot was able to simulate like humans.


1990: Elephants Don’t Play Chess

In 1990, Rodney Brooks who is an Australian roboticist published a new approach to AI development. His approach was based on the physical interaction with the environment.


1993: The Coming Technological Singularity

In 1993, Vernor Vinge published a report stating that soon Technological Singularity will come and that’s too within 30 years. He postulated that the human era is going to end.


1995: A.L.I.C.E.

In 1995, Richard Wallace developed a chatbot A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) which was inspired by Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA.


1997 : Deep Blue

In 1997, Deep Blue, a computer played chess against the reigning world chess champion and won.


1998: Furby

In 1998, Furby the first pet robot was created by Dave Hampton and Caleb Chung.


2000: KISMET

KISMET the first robot that could recognized emotions was developed at MIT


2000: ASIMO

ASIMO is an AI humanoid robot developed by Honda was able to walk as fast as human.


2001: A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Steven Spielberg released his movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence where a robot was programmed with the ability to love.


2004: DARPA Grand Challange

In 2004, in the Mojave Desert the first DARPA Grand Challenge was held. 150-mile route was designed for the autonomous vehicles but no was able to complete it.


2006: Machine Reading

In 2006, the Machine Reading term came into the picture. This term was coined by Oren Etzioni, Michele Banko, and Michael Cafarella.


2009: Unsupervised Learning using Graphics Processors

In 2009, Rajat Raina along with Anand Madhavan and Andrew NG published their work Large-scale Deep Unsupervised Learning using Graphics Processors. In this, they argued that modern graphics processors have far better computational capability than normal multicore CPUs and they can revolutionize the applicability of deep unsupervised learning methods.


2009: Google Driverless Car

In 2009, Google started working on the driverless car and in 2014 their car was able to pass the self-driving test of Nevada.

From 2009 to till now, a lot of work has been done in the AI sector. But those are too technical to explain here. AI is the fastest growing sector and very soon it will be a part of every industry.

At CS-SmartKids we help kids to understand the AI from a very early stage. Your kids are the future and that’s why you have to introduce them AI today so that tomorrow they will be able to understand whatever will be happening around them.

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