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This is a timeline.
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Konrad Zuse built the first working program-controlled computers
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Warren McCulloch & Walter Pitts publish "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" (1943), laying foundations for neural networks.
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Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener & Julian Bigelow coin the term "cybernetics" in a 1943 paper. This layed the foundations for artificial neural networks.
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Alan Turing proposes the Turing Test as a measure of machine intelligence
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The first working AI programs were written in 1951 to run on the Ferranti Mark 1 machine of the University of Manchester: a checkers-playing program written by Christopher Strachey and a chess-playing program written by Dietrich Prinz.
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Arthur Samuel (IBM) wrote the first game-playing program, for checkers (draughts), to achieve sufficient skill to challenge a respectable amateur. His first checkers-playing program was written in 1952, and in 1955 he created a version that learned to play.
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The first Dartmouth College summer AI conference is organized by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathan Rochester of IBM and Claude Shannon
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The name artificial intelligence is used for the first time as the topic of the second Dartmouth Conference, organized by John McCarthy
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The General Problem Solver (GPS) demonstrated by Newell, Shaw and Simon.
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John McCarthy (Massachusetts Institute of Technology or MIT) invented the Lisp programming language.
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John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky founded the MIT AI Lab.
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First industrial robot company, Unimation, founded.
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The Assembly Robotics Group at University of Edinburgh builds Freddy Robot, capable of using visual perception to locate and assemble models. (See Edinburgh Freddy Assembly Robot: a versatile computer-controlled assembly system.)
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BKG, a backgammon program written by Hans Berliner at CMU, defeats the reigning world champion.
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Lisp machines developed and marketed. First expert system shells and commercial applications.
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Neural Networks become widely used with the Backpropagation algorithm (first described by Paul Werbos in 1974).
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Major advances in all areas of AI, with significant demonstrations in machine learning, intelligent tutoring, case-based reasoning, multi-agent planning, scheduling, uncertain reasoning, data mining, natural language understanding and translation, vision, virtual reality, games, and other topics.
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Semi-autonomous ALVINN steered a car coast-to-coast under computer control for all but about 50 of the 2850 miles. Throttle and brakes, however, were controlled by a human driver.
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Web crawlers and other AI-based information extraction programs become essential in widespread use of the World Wide Web.
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Interactive robopets ("smart toys") become commercially available, realizing the vision of the 18th century novelty toy makers.
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The Nomad robot explores remote regions of Antarctica looking for meteorite samples.
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Honda's ASIMO robot, an artificially intelligent humanoid robot, is able to walk as fast as a human, delivering trays to customers in restaurant settings.
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YAY!
