A Brief History of AI

The possibility of intelligent machines has been discovered in Greek mythology literacy where real and fake machines had been know to demonstrate some sort of intelligence. Though the possibility of actually making an intelligent machine started around the date of World War II.

The term Artificial Intelligence was first used in 1950 by Alan Turing, 6 years before the term used by John McCarthy. The term was used in a paper by that argued that there is a possibility of building intelligent machines. This paper also discussed The Turing Test.

8 years later John McCarthy invented the first artificial intelligence language. It was named LISP. Lisp was designed so that McCarthy could write one command then see what happened, write another command and see what happened, it was a guess and check system. With LISP researchers could build a system, feed it different kinds of data and play with it. One could even write code that would change itself based on external stimulus. This was incredibly different from assembly language programming, where even the smallest change noticeable to the user could take hours of modification.

In the late 1990's AI programs commonly called spiders were invented. These spiders were able to search and rank web pages all over the internet, these spiders are major factors in several search engine including search engine giants Google also contributing to the .com boom.

Below is a brief timeline of some Artificial Intelligence landmarks

1956
At Dartmouth computer conference, John McCarthy uses the term "Artificial Intelligence".

At Carnegie Mellon University the first running AI program is demonstrated.

1958
The Lisp AI language is invented by John McCarthy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

1965
Joseph Weizenbaum creates ELIZA, a program that you can have a conversation with.

1972
Alain Colmerauer develops AI program PROLOG.

1978
The Economics Nobel prize was awarded to Herb Simon for his theory of bounded rationality, a cornerstone of AI.

1980's
Lisp Machines Developed and Marketed.

1980
First National Conference for Artificial Intelligence.

1990's
TD-Gammon created, AI backgammon game able to compete with world class players.

1995
Robot pets become available that you can virtually feed, pet, play games with and medically treat.

1997
'Deep Blue', a computer with AI developed by IBM defeats world chess champion of 12 years Garry Kasparov.

Web-Crawlers, AI programs commonly known as spiders are created and become a important part of Search Engines such as Google, altavista and All the Web contributing to the .com boom.

2000
More advanced and 'clever' AI pets released.