HackingTheUniverse

Artificial intelligence today is mostly a branch of computer science that attempts to create agents that collect and analyze sensory input in order to make reasoning decisions about actions to take based on the decisions.

-0940 – King Mu of Zhou (Chinese mythology/history) – an engineer named Yan Shi gave King Mu a mechanical human shaped figure.

-0215 – Galatea (Greek mythology) – King Pygmalion carved an ivory statue of a woman, fell in love with it, then convinced the goddess Aphrodite to bring it to life.

0010 – Heron – created many automated machines, including mechanical men

1232 – Llul – created an “Ars Magna” (great work) and the Llulian circle, which attempted to create knowledge by combining attributes and ideas

1642 – mechanical calculating machine created by Pascal

1646 – Liebniz – developed a universal meta-language, called “characteristica universalis”, which was based on work by Llul.

1709 – Vaucanson – built automatons, including the “Digesting Duck”.

1763 – Bayes theorem of probability

1791 – Babbage – designed a calculating engine

1847 – an algebra of logic created by Boole

1928 – minimax theory created by Von Neumann

1944 – “The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior” published by Von Neumann and Morgenstern, established game theory and enhanced “minimax” analysis

1945 – “As We May Think” published by Vannevar Bush

1950 – the Turing Test established by Turing in “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” which proposed to identify artificial intelligence by using normal conversation as a standard.

1950 – “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess” published by Shannon

1950 – three laws of robotics (science-fiction) published by Asimov

1952 – a mechanical mouse called “Theseus” who could learn to navigate mazes was built by Shannon in Bell Labs in an attempt to study telephone switching techniques

1955 – the term, “Artificial Intelligence” is first used

1957 – “An Inductive Inference Machine” published by Solomonoff, creating the concept of machine learning

1958 – game tree pruning invented

1958 – the Perceptron computer could learn by trial and error, invented by Rosenblatt

1960 – LISP introduced as an AI programming language by McCarthy

1965 – “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine” published by Good, created the concept of a technological singularity caused by superhuman intelligence

1968 – science fiction movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey” features the HAL 9000 which is a sentient AI

1974 – back propagation algorithm invented by Werbos

1997 – IBM supercomputer, “Deep Blue” defeats chess champion Kasporov

2005 – Stanford’s VW Touareg named “Stanley” becomes first car to win DARPA autonomous driving competition

2010 – NELL (Never Ending Language Learning) system activated at Carnegie Mellon Institute to demonstrate machine learning of semantics

2010 – “Roxxxy” becomes the first full sized robotic sex companion
(see also: Sex with AI)

2011 – IBM supercomputer, “Watson” defeats humans at Jeopardy game on TV

2011 – Stanford University offers a free online course, “An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence”, taught by Norvig and Thrun