This is a timeline of artificial intelligence, also known as synthetic intelligence.
Antiquity, Classical and Medieval eras Date Development AntiquityGreek myths of Hephaestus and Pygmalion incorporated the idea of intelligent automata (such as Talos) and artificial beings (such as Galatea and Pandora). Sacred mechanical statues built in Egypt and Greece were believed to be capable of wisdom and emotion. Hermes Trismegistus would write, "They have 'sensus' and 'spiritus'... by discovering the true nature of the gods, man has been able to reproduce it." 10th century BC Yan Shi presented King Mu of Zhou with mechanical men that were capable of moving their bodies independently. 384 BC–322 BC Aristotle described the syllogism, a method of formal, mechanical thought in the Organon. Aristotle also described means–ends analysis (an algorithm for planning) in Nicomachean Ethics, the same algorithm used by Newell and Simon's General Problem Solver (1959).3rd century BCCtesibius invents a mechanical water clock with an alarm. This was the first example of a feedback mechanism. 1st century Hero of Alexandria created mechanical men and other automatons. He produced what may have been "the world's first practical programmable machine:" an automatic theatre. 260 Porphyry wrote Isagogê which categorized knowledge and logic, including a drawing of what would later be called a "semantic net". ~800 Jabir ibn Hayyan developed the Arabic alchemical theory of Takwin, the artificial creation of life in the laboratory, up to and including human life. 9th Century The Banū Mūsā brothers created a programmable music automaton described in their Book of Ingenious Devices: a steam-driven flute controlled by a program represented by pins on a revolving cylinder. This was "perhaps the first machine with a stored program". al-Khwarizmi wrote textbooks with precise step-by-step methods for arithmetic and algebra, used in Islam, India and Europe until the 16th century. The word "algorithm" is derived from his name. 1206 Ismail al-Jazari created a programmable orchestra of mechanical human beings.A Thirteenth Century Programmable Robot 1275 Ramon Llull, Mallorcan theologian, invents the Ars Magna, a tool for combining concepts mechanically based on an Arabic astrological tool, the Zairja. Llull described his machines as mechanical entities that could combine basic truth and facts to produce advanced knowledge. The method was further developed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the 17th century.; ~1500 Paracelsus claimed to have created an artificial man out of magnetism, sperm, and alchemy. ~1580 Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague is said to have invented the Golem, a clay man brought to life.,
1600–1900 Date Development 1620 Francis Bacon developed empirical theory of knowledge and introduced inductive logic in his work Novum Organum, a play on Aristotle's title Organon. 1623 Wilhelm Schickard drew a calculating clock on a letter to Kepler. This will be the first of five unsuccessful attempts at designing a direct entry calculating clock in the 17th century (including the designs of Tito Burattini, Samuel Morland and René Grillet). 1641 Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan and presented a mechanical, combinatorial theory of cognition. He wrote "...for reason is nothing but reckoning". 1642 Blaise Pascal invented a mechanical calculator, the first digital calculating machine.; 1647 René Descartes proposed that bodies of animals are nothing more than complex machines (but that mental phenomena are of a different "substance").; 1654 Blaise Pascal described how to find expected values in probability, in 1662 Antoine Arnauld published a formula to find the maximum expected value, and in 1663, Gerolamo Cardano's solution to the same problems was published 116 years after it was written. The theory of probability was further developed by Jacob Bernoulli and Pierre-Simon Laplace in the 18th century. Probability theory would become central to AI and machine learning from the 1990s onward. 1672 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz improved the earlier machines, making the Stepped Reckoner to do multiplication and division. 1676 Leibniz derived the chain rule. The rule is used by AI to train neural networks, for example the backpropagation algorithm uses the chain rule. 1679 Leibniz developed a universal calculus of reasoning (alphabet of human thought) by which arguments could be decided mechanically. It assigned a specific number to each object in the world, as a prelude to an algebraic solution to all possible problems.; 1726 Jonathan Swift published Gulliver's Travels, which includes this description of the Engine, a machine on the island of Laputa: "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."Quoted in The machine is a parody of Ars Magna, one of the inspirations of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz' mechanism. 1738 Daniel Bernoulli introduces the concept of "utility", a generalization of probability, the basis of economics and decision theory, and the mathematical foundation for the way AI represents the "goals" of intelligent agents. 1739 David Hume described induction, the logical method of learning generalities from examples. 1750 Julien Offray de La Mettrie published L'Homme Machine, which argued that human thought is strictly mechanical.1763Thomas Bayes's work An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances, published two years after his death, laid the foundations of Bayes' theorem and used in modern AI in Bayesian networks. 1769 Wolfgang von Kempelen built and toured with his chess-playing automaton, The Turk, which Kempelen claimed could defeat human players. The Turk was later shown to be a hoax, involving a human chess player. 1795–1805 The simplest kind of artificial neural network is the linear network. It has been known for over two centuries as the method of least squares or linear regression. It was used as a means of finding a good rough linear fit to a set of points by Adrien-Marie Legendre (1805) and Carl Friedrich Gauss (1795) for the prediction of planetary movement.1805Joseph Marie Jacquard created a programmable loom, based on earlier inventions by Basile Bouchon (1725), Jean-Baptiste Falcon (1728) and Jacques Vaucanson (1740).; Razy, C. (1913), p. 120. Replaceable punched cards controlled sequences of operations in the process of manufacturing textiles. This may have been the first industrial software for commercial enterprises. 1818 Mary Shelley published the story of Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus, a fictional consideration of the ethics of creating sentient beings. 1822–1859 Charles Babbage & Ada Lovelace worked on programmable mechanical calculating machines.; 1837The mathematician Bernard Bolzano made the first modern attempt to formalize semantics. 1854 George Boole set out to "investigate the fundamental laws of those operations of the mind by which reasoning is performed, to give expression to them in the symbolic language of a calculus", inventing Boolean algebra.; 1863 Samuel Butler suggested that Darwinian evolution also applies to machines and speculates that they will one day become conscious and eventually supplant humanity.Project Gutenberg eBook Erewhon by Samuel Butler.Poes.....
20th century 1901–1950
Date Development 1910-1913 Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead published Principia Mathematica, which showed that all of elementary mathematics could be reduced to mechanical reasoning in formal logic. 1912-1914 Leonardo Torres Quevedo built an automaton for chess endgames, El Ajedrecista. He was called "the 20th century's first AI pioneer". In his Essays on Automatics (1914), Torres published theories about thinking and automata and introduced the idea of floating-point arithmetic. 1923 Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) opened in London. This is the first use of the word "robot" in English. 1920–1925 Wilhelm Lenz and Ernst Ising created and analyzed the Ising model (1925) which can be viewed as the first artificial recurrent neural network (RNN) consisting of neuron-like threshold elements. In 1972, Shun'ichi Amari made this architecture adaptive. 1920s and 1930s Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) inspires Rudolf Carnap and the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle to use formal logic as the foundation of philosophy. However, Wittgenstein's later work in the 1940s demonstrates that context-free symbolic logic is incoherent without human interpretation. 1931 Kurt Gödel encoded mathematical statements and proofs as integers and showed that there are true theorems that are unprovable by any consistent theorem-proving machine. Thus, "he identified fundamental limits of algorithmic theorem proving, computing, and any type of computation-based AI,", laying the foundations of theoretical computer science and AI theory. 1935Alonzo Church extended Gödel's proof and showed that the decision problem of computer science does not have a general solution. He developed the Lambda calculus, which will eventually be fundamental to the theory of computer languages. 1936 Konrad Zuse filed his patent application for a program-controlled computer.K. Zuse (1936). Verfahren zur selbsttätigen Durchführung von Rechnungen mit Hilfe von Rechenmaschinen. Patent application Z 23 139 / GMD Nr. 005/021, 1936. 1937Alan Turing published "On Computable Numbers", which laid the foundations of the modern theory of computation by introducing the Turing machine, a physical interpretation of "computability". He used it to confirm Gödel by proving that the halting problem is undecidable. 1940 Edward Condon displayed Nimatron, a digital machine that played Nim perfectly. 1941 Konrad Zuse built the first working program-controlled general-purpose computer. and see also The Life and Work of Konrad Zuse 1943 Warren Sturgis McCulloch and Walter Pitts publish "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity", the first mathematical description of an artificial neural networks.; Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow coin the term "cybernetics". Wiener's popular book by that name was published in 1948. 1945 Game theory, which would prove invaluable in the progress of AI, was introduced with the 1944 paper "Theory of Games and Economic Behavior" by mathematician John von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern. Vannevar Bush published "As We May Think" (The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945), a prescient vision of the future in which computers assist humans in many activities.1948 Alan Turing produces the "Intelligent Machinery" report, regarded as the first manifesto of Artificial Intelligence. It introduces many concepts, including the logic-based approach to problem-solving, that intellectual activity consists mainly of various kinds of search, and a discussion of machine learning in which he anticipates the Connectionism AI approach. John von Neumann (quoted by Edwin Thompson Jaynes) in response to a comment at a lecture that it was impossible for a machine (at least ones created by humans) to think: "You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you will tell me precisely what it is that a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that!". Von Neumann was presumably alluding to the Church–Turing thesis, which states that any effective procedure can be simulated by a (generalized) computer. 1949 Donald O. Hebb develops Hebbian theory, a possible algorithm for learning in neural networks.
1950s