A Timeline of
Artificial Intelligence
Selections from Milestones in the Development of
Artificial Intelligence by Mark Kantrowitz, 1994

 

 1917: Karel Capek coins the term `robot' (in Czech `robot'
       means `worker', but the English translation retained
       the original word).
 1928: John von Neumann's minimax theorem (later used in game
       playing programs).
 1943: McCulloch and Pitt propose neural-network
       architectures for intelligence.

 1950: Isaac Asimov, "I, Robot"
 1950: Shannon proposes chess program
 1950: Turing Test proposed (Turing's "Computing Machinery
       and Intelligence")
 1954: Isaac Asimov, "The Caves of Steel" (Robot Science
       Fiction)
 1955: Newell, Shaw, and Simon develop "IPL-11", first AI
       language
 1956: Newell, Shaw, and Simon create "The Logic Theorist", a
       program that solves math problems.
 1956: AI named at Dartmouth computer conference, first
       meeting of McCarthy, Minsky, Newell, and Simon.
 1956: CIA funds GAT machine-translation project.
 1956: Ulam develops "MANIAC I", the first chess program to
       beat a human being.
 1957: Chomsky writes "Syntactic Structures"
 1957: Newell, Shaw, & Simon create General Problem Solver
       (GPS) means-ends analysis
 1958: McCarthy introduces "LISP" at MIT
 1959: Minsky and McCarthy establish MIT AI lab
 1959: Rosenblatt introduces Perceptron.
 1959: Samuel's checkers program wins games against best
       human players.

 1960: Bar-Hillel publishes a paper describing difficulty of
       machine translation.
 1962: McCarthy moves to Stanford, founding Stanford AI Lab
       in 1963.
 1962: First commercial industrial robots.
 1963: ARPA gives $2 million grant to MIT AI Lab.
 1963: Sutherland's SKETCHPAD: drawing tool (CAD),
       constraint solver, WYSIWYG
 1963: M. Ross Quillian  (semantic networks as a knowledge
       representation)
 1963: Susumo Kuno's parser tested on "Time flies like an
       arrow"
 1963: Minsky's "Steps towards Artificial Intelligence"
 1964: Bobrow's STUDENT (solves high-school algebra word
       problems)
 1964: Development of BBNLisp begins at BBN
 1965: Buchanan, Feigenbaum & Lederberg begin DENDRAL expert
       system project.
 1965: Iva Sutherland demonstrates first head-mounted display
       (virtual reality)
 1965: Simon predicts, "by 1985 machines will be capable of
       doing any work a man can do"
 1965: Dreyfus argues against the possibility of AI.
 1966: Donald Michie founds Edinburgh AI lab.
 1966: Weizanbaum's ELIZA
 1967: Greenblatt's MacHack defeats Hubert Deyfus at chess.
 1967: "HAL" stars in Clarke and Kubrick's "2001"
 1968: Minsky's "Semantic Information Processing"
 1968: Chomsky and Halle's "The Sound Pattern of English"
 1969: Minsky & Papert's "Perceptions" (limits of single-
       layer neural networks)
 1969: Hearn & Griss define Standard Lisp to port the REDUCE
      symbolic algebra system.

 1970: PROLOG (Colmerauer)
 1970: Pople and Myers begin INTERNIST (aid in diagnosis of
       human diseases)
 1970: Terry Winograd's SHRDLU (Natural Language Processing,
       Blocks World)
 1970: Winston's ARCH
 1971: Colby's PARRY
 1972: Dreyfus publishes "What Computer's Can't Do"
 1972: Smalltalk developed at Xerox PARC (Kay)
 1973: Lighthill report kills AI funding in UK.
 1973: Schank and Alberson develop scripts.
 1974: Edward Shortliffe's thesis on MYCIN.
 1974: First computer-controlled robot.
 1974: Minsky's "A Framework for Representing Knowledge".
 1974: SUMEX-AIM network established (applications of AI to
       medicine)
 1975: Cooper & Erlbaum found Nestor to develop neural net
       technology.
 1975: DARPA launches image understanding funding program.
 1975: Larry Harris founds Artificial Intelligence Corp.
       (NLP)
 1976: Adventure (Crowther and Woods) - first adventure game.
 1976: Greenblatt creates first LISP machine, "CONS"
 1976: Kurzweil introduces reading machine.
 1976: Lenat's AM (Automated Mathematician)
 1976: Marr's primal sketch as a visual presentation.
 1977: C3PO and R2D2 star in "Star Wars".
 1978: Marr and Nishihara propose 2-1/2 dimensional sketch
 1978: Xerox LISP machines
 1979: Raj Reddy founds Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon
       University.
 1979: MYCIN as good as medical experts (Journal of American
       Medical Assoc.)
 1979: Publication of Weinreb and Moon's MIT AI Lab memo on
       Flavors, an OOP offering advanced capabilities still
       not generally unavailable outside the LISP language
       family.

 1980: Expert systems up to a thousand rules.
 1980: First AAAI conference at Stanford.
 1980: Greenblatt & Jacobson found LMI; Noftsker starts
       Symbolics.
 1980: Hofstader writes "G\"odel, Escher, Bach", wins
       Pulitzer.
 1980: McDermott's XCON for configuring VAX systems (DEC and
       CMU)
 1980: First biannual ACM LISP and Functional Programming
       Conference.
 1981: Kazuhiro Fuchi announces Japanese Fifth Generation
       project.
 1981: MITI wants intelligent computers by 1990.
 1981: Teknowledge founded by Feigenbaum.
 1981: PSL (Portable Standard Lisp) runs on a variety of
       platforms.
 1981: Lisp machines from Xerox, LMI, and Symbolics available
       commercially, making dynamic OOP technology available
       on a widespread basis.
 1981: Grass roots definition of Common Lisp as the common
       aspects of the family of languages- Lisp Machine Lisp,
       MacLisp, NIL, S-1 Lisp, Spice Lisp, Scheme.
 1982: Publication of British government's "Alvey Report" on
       advanced information technology, leading to boost in
       Ai (Expert Systems) being used in industry.
 1982: Japan's ICOT formed.
 1982: John Hopfield resuscitates neural nets.
 1982: SRI's PROSPECTOR finds major deposit of molybdenum.
 1983: Asimov writes "Robot's of Dawn".
 1983: Feigenbaum & McCorduck publish "The Fifth Generation".
 1983: DARPA announced Strategic Computing Initiative.
 1983: IntelliGenetics markets KEE.
 1983: MCC consortium formed under Bobby Ray Inman.
 1984: Publication of Steele's "Common Lisp the Language"
 1984: Chamberlain's RACTER `writes' book
 1984: Doug Lenat begins CYC project at MCC.
 1984: European Community starts ESPRIT program.
 1984: GM puts $4 million into Teknowledge.
 1984: Gold Hill creates Golden Common LISP.
 1984: TI wins MIT contract for Lisp machines away from
       Symbolics.
 1984: "Wabot-2" reads sheet music and plays organ.
 1985: GM and Campbell's Soup don't use Lisp for expert
       systems.
 1985: Kawasaki robot kills Japanese mechanic during
       malfunction.
 1985: MIT Media Lab founded.
 1985: Minsky publishes "The Society of Mind"
 1985: Palladian sells Financial Adviser.
 1985: Teknowledge abandons LISP and PROLOG for C.
 1985: Xerox wins $20 million contract for LISP machines,
       later cancelled.
 1986: X3J13 forms to produce a draft for an ANSI Common Lisp
       standard.
 1986: AI industry revenue now $1,000,000,000
 1986: Anderson's robotic Ping-Pong player wins against
       human.
 1986: Borland offers Turbo PROLOG for $99.
 1986: CMU's HiTech chess machine competes at senior master
       level.
 1986: Dallas Police use robot to break into an apartment.
 1986: First OOPSLA conference on object-oriented
       programming, at which CLOS is first publicized outside
       the Lisp/AI community.
 1986: IBM enters AI fray at AAAI, with a LISP, a PROLOG, and
       an ES shell.
 1986: Max Headroom
 1986: McClelland & Rumelhart's "Parallel Distributed
       Processing" (Neural Nets)
 1986: Neural net startup companies appear.
 1986: OCR now $100 million industry.
 1986: PICON ES group leaves LMI and starts Gensym.
 1986: Paperback Software offers VP Expert for $99.
 1986: Teknowledge goes public, amid wild optimism.
 1986: Thinking Machines introduces Connection Machine.
 1987: Symbolics pioneers the OODB market with Statice, a
       Flavors-based system.
 1987: Lisp Pointers commences publication.
 1987: 1,900 computers are working Expert systems.
 1987: AI revenue $1.4 billion, excluding robotics.
 1987: NLP revenue approximately $80 million.
 1987: Robotic-vision revenue $300 million.
 1987: DEC's "XCON" configures computers doing work of 300
       people using 10,000 rules.
 1987: Japan's AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identifacation
       System)
 1987: LMI files for bankruptcy, other bankruptcies and
       layoffs follow.
 1987: "Ai Winter"; Lisp-machine market saturated.
 1988: Common Lisp development environments on general-
       purpose platforms begin to rival those available on
       Lisp Machines (e.g., native CLOS, pre-emptive
       multitasking, full suites of integrated tools, etc.)
 1988: 386 chip brings PC speeds into competition with LISP
       machines.
 1988: Expert systems revenue over $400 million.
 1988: Hillis's "Connection Machine", capable of 65,536
       parallel computations.
 1988: Minsky and Papert publish revised edition of
       "Perceptrons"
 1988: Object-oriented languages are "in".
 1988: TI announces MicroExplorer (Macintosh with a LISP
       machine)
 1988: Teknowledge merges with American Cimflex.
 1989: Coral sold to Apple, re-marketed as Macintosh Allegro
       Common Lisp.
 1989: Palladian ceases production.

 1990: Steele publishes second edition of "Common Lisp the
       Language"
 1990: AICorp goes public.
 1990: Symbolics Lisp Users Group (SLUG) votes to expand its
       charter into an Association of Lisp Users, and to
       expand the scope of its annual conference
       correspondingly.
 1991: KnowlegeWare cancels offer to buy IntelliCorp.
 1992: Apple Computer introduces Dylan, a language in the
       Lisp family as its vision for the future of
       programming.
 1992: X3J13 creates a draft proposed American National
       Standard for Common Lisp.
 1993: Kurweil AI goes public.
 1993: Symbolics files for bankruptcy.
 1994: Franz Inc. announces the AllegroStore OODB.
 1994: Harlequin's real-time CLOS is used in an announced
       AT&T switching system.
 1994: Thinking Machines files for bankruptcy.
 1994: (Projected) ANSI Common Lisp becomes the first ANSI-
       standard OOPL.

Copyright © 1997 Atool Varma and Nathan Erhardt.