Timeline of AI

1956
photo of men who attended 1956 Dartmouth conference
Dartmouth workshop

At this groundbreaking meeting, the 20 men who attended didn’t invent anything or write any code. They brainstormed. Several went on to found AI labs or projects at prestigious schools, including Stanford and MIT. Their influence shaped research on AI for the next 30 years.

Proposal Wikipedia
1958
a diagram of the first perceptron
Perceptron

Frank Rosenblatt developed the precursor to today’s neural networks. He died at age 43, and his work was undermined by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert in a 1969 book.

Research Obituary NYT Article
1959
photo of Arthur Samuel with an IBM 701 computer and a checkerboard
Checkers

An IBM engineer named Arthur Samuel used IBM’s very first commercial computer to create a program that learned to play checkers. It became a better player than Samuel himself through self-play, a key technique in some machine-learning systems even today.

Research Obituary
1970s
book cover, computer-based medical consultations: mycin
MYCIN

MYCIN is often referred to as a “successful” expert system from the early heyday of symbolic AI. It was designed to help doctors determine treatment for patients with blood diseases. However, it remained a research project — an experimental system. The knowledge base and rules had to be explicitly coded, making it impractical to update.

History
1998
handwritten single digits from 0 to 9 in 16 columns
MNIST dataset

An important early collection of images used for training a system to recognize (and differentiate among) handwritten digits, 0–9. It consists of a training set (60,000 images) and a test set (10,000 images).

Research
Year
photo of android head with circuitry exposed
Card title

Some quick example text to build on the card title and make up the bulk of the card's content.

Go somewhere
Year
photo of android head with circuitry exposed
Card title

Some quick example text to build on the card title and make up the bulk of the card's content.

Go somewhere
Year
photo of android head with circuitry exposed
Card title

Some quick example text to build on the card title and make up the bulk of the card's content.

Go somewhere
Year
photo of android head with circuitry exposed
Card title

Some quick example text to build on the card title and make up the bulk of the card's content.

Go somewhere

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