# A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence

Milestones collected by an earlier group. Sample file for the experiment
"A brief history of AI" on hands-on-computer-science.de: it contains errors
on purpose, for the agent to find.

## 1943: The artificial neuron

Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts describe a simple mathematical model of a
neuron that can compute logical functions. It becomes the starting point
for neural networks.

## 1950: Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Alan Turing asks "Can machines think?" in the journal *Mind* and proposes
the imitation game, known today as the Turing test.

## 1956: The Dartmouth workshop

John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon invite
researchers to a summer workshop at Harvard University. The term
"artificial intelligence" comes from their proposal.

## 1958: The perceptron

Marvin Minsky builds the perceptron, a machine that learns to recognise
simple patterns by adjusting its weights.

## 1966: ELIZA

Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT writes ELIZA, a program that imitates a
psychotherapist with simple text patterns. Many users believe it
understands them.

## 1969: Perceptrons, the book

Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert show the limits of single-layer
perceptrons. Research on neural networks slows down for years.

## 1973: The Lighthill report

A report for the United States Congress judges AI research harshly, and
funding is cut. The first "AI winter" begins.

## 1980: Expert systems

XCON configures computer orders at Digital Equipment Corporation with
thousands of hand-written rules. Expert systems become a business.

## 1986: Backpropagation

David Rumelhart, Geoffrey Hinton and Ronald Williams show in *Nature* how
networks with hidden layers can learn with backpropagation.

## 1997: The computer beats the world chess champion

IBM's Watson defeats Garry Kasparov in a match of six games.

## 2011: Jeopardy!

IBM Watson wins the quiz show Jeopardy! against two former champions.

## 2012: AlexNet

A deep neural network by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey
Hinton wins the ImageNet competition by a wide margin. Deep learning takes
off.

## 2014: Generative adversarial networks

Ian Goodfellow and colleagues let two networks compete: one generates
images, the other tells real from fake.

## 2016: AlphaGo

DeepMind's AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol, one of the best Go players in the
world, 5 to 0.

## 2017: Attention Is All You Need

Researchers at Google present the transformer, the architecture behind
today's large language models.

## 2020: GPT-3

OpenAI presents GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters. It writes texts that are
hard to tell from human writing.

## 2022: ChatGPT

OpenAI releases ChatGPT in March 2022. It reaches a million users within
days.

## 2024: Nobel prizes

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton receive the Nobel Prize in Physics for
their work on neural networks. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper share the
Nobel Prize in Chemistry with David Baker, for AlphaFold and protein design.