History
1666 Mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz publishes Dissertatio de arte combinatoria (On the Combinatorial Art), following Ramon Llull in proposing an alphabet of human thought and arguing that all ideas are nothing but combinations of a relatively small number of simple concepts.
1726 Jonathan Swift publishes Gulliver’s Travels, which includes a description of the Engine, a machine on the island of Laputa (and a parody of Llull’s ideas): “a Project for improving speculative Knowledge by practical and mechanical Operations.” By using this “Contrivance,” “the most ignorant Person at a reasonable Charge, and with a little bodily Labour, may write Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks, and Theology, with the least Assistance from Genius or study.”
1763 Thomas Bayes develops a framework for reasoning about the probability of events. Bayesian inference will become a leading approach in machine learning.
1854 George Boole argues that logical reasoning could be performed systematically in the same manner as solving a system of equations.
exhibition in the recently completed Madison Square Garden, Nikola Tesla makes a demonstration of the world’s first radio-controlled vessel. The boat was equipped with, as Tesla described, “a borrowed mind.”
1914 The Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres y Quevedo demonstrates the first chess-playing machine, capable of king and rook against king endgames without any human intervention.
1921 Czech writer Karel Čapek introduces the word “robot” in his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). The word “robot” comes from the word “robota” (work).
1925 Houdina Radio Control releases a radio-controlled driverless car, travelling the streets of New York City.
1927 The science-fiction film Metropolis is released. It features a robot double of a peasant girl, Maria, which unleashes chaos in Berlin of 2026—it was the first robot depicted on film, inspiring the Art Deco look of C-3PO in Star Wars.
1929 Makoto Nishimura designs Gakutensoku, Japanese for “learning from the laws of nature,” the first robot built in Japan. It could change its facial expression and move its head and hands via an air pressure mechanism.
1943 Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts publish “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity” in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics. This influential paper, in which they discussed networks of idealized and simplified artificial “neurons” and how they might perform simple logical functions, will become the inspiration for computer-based “neural networks” (and later “deep learning”) and their popular description as “mimicking the brain.”
1949 Edmund Berkeley publishes Giant Brains: Or Machines That Think in which he writes: “Recently there have been a good deal of news about strange giant machines that can handle information with vast speed and skill….These machines are similar to what a brain would be if it were made of hardware and wire instead of flesh and nerves… A machine can handle information; it can calculate, conclude, and choose; it can perform reasonable operations with information. A machine, therefore, can think.”
1950 Claude Shannon’s “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess” is the first published article on developing a chess-playing computer program.
1950 Alan Turing publishes “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” in which he proposes “the imitation game” which will later become known as the “Turing Test.”
1951 Marvin Minsky and Dean Edmunds build SNARC (Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator), the first artificial neural network, using 3000 vacuum tubes to simulate a network of 40 neurons.
1958 John McCarthy develops programming language Lisp which becomes the most popular programming language used in artificial intelligence research.
1959 Arthur Samuel coins the term “machine learning,” reporting on programming a computer “so that it will learn to play a better game of checkers than can be played by the person who wrote the program.”
1959 Oliver Selfridge publishes “Pandemonium: A paradigm for learning” in the Proceedings of the Symposium on Mechanization of Thought Processes, in which he describes a model for a process by which computers could recognize patterns that have not been specified in advance.
1959 John McCarthy publishes “Programs with Common Sense” in the Proceedings of the Symposium on Mechanization of Thought Processes, in which he describes the Advice Taker, a program for solving problems by manipulating sentences in formal languages with the ultimate objective of making programs “that learn from their experience as effectively as humans do.”
1961 The first industrial robot, Unimate, starts working on an assembly line in a General Motors plant in New Jersey
1965 Joseph Weizenbaum develops ELIZA, an interactive program that carries on a dialogue in English language on any topic. Weizenbaum, who wanted to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between man and machine, was surprised by the number of people who attributed human-like feelings to the computer program.
1970 The first anthropomorphic robot, the WABOT-1, is built at Waseda University in Japan. It consisted of a limb-control system, a vision system and a conversation system.
1972 MYCIN, an early expert system for identifying bacteria causing severe infections and recommending antibiotics, is developed at Stanford University.
1973 James Lighthill reports to the British Science Research Council on the state artificial intelligence research, concluding that “in no part of the field have discoveries made so far produced the major impact that was then promised,” leading to drastically reduced government support for AI research.
1980 Wabot-2 is built at Waseda University in Japan, a musician humanoid robot able to communicate with a person, read a musical score and play tunes of average difficulty on an electronic organ
1986 First driverless car, a Mercedes-Benz van equipped with cameras and sensors, built at Bundeswehr University in Munich under the direction of Ernst Dickmanns, drives up to 55 mph on empty streets.
1989 Yann LeCun and other researchers at AT&T Bell Labs successfully apply a backpropagation algorithm to a multi-layer neural network, recognizing handwritten ZIP codes. Given the hardware limitations at the time, it took about 3 days (still a significant improvement over earlier efforts) to train the network.
2000 MIT’s Cynthia Breazeal develops Kismet, a robot that could recognize and simulate emotions.
2000 Honda’s ASIMO robot, an artificially intelligent humanoid robot, is able to walk as fast as a human, delivering trays to customers in a restaurant setting.
Comments
Post a Comment