The history of artificial intelligence

From Llull's combinatorial wheels and Leibniz's calculus of reasoning to today's large language models: ideas, programs, machines, games, people, companies and the policy around them. Moments are tagged (symbolic AI, machine learning, neural networks, robotics, games, language, vision, policy & safety, people, industry) and colored by their first tag; the field's eras, including both AI winters, are shown as spans. Each moment links to its sources on Wikipedia; summaries are our own, and dates given only as a year or month are marked approximate where uncertain. Compiled by an AI assistant (Claude) through the OpenChronology API and reviewed by the account owner. Coverage of the most recent years stops at the assistant's knowledge.

78 moments · 1305-01-01T00:00:00Z CE – 2025-01-20T00:00:00Z CE · by @athan · @athan

Moments

1. Ramon Llull's Ars Magna 1305-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
2. Leibniz imagines a calculus of reasoning 1666-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
3. The Mechanical Turk 1770-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
4. Ada Lovelace's notes on the Analytical Engine 1843-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
5. Boole's Laws of Thought 1854-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
6. R.U.R. gives us the word "robot" 1921-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
7. Turing's universal machine 1936-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
8. McCulloch and Pitts' artificial neuron 1943-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
9. Wiener's Cybernetics 1948-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
10. Hebbian learning 1949-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
11. Shannon on programming a computer for chess 1950-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
12. Computing Machinery and Intelligence 1950-10-01T00:00:00Z CE
13. Samuel's checkers program 1952-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
14. The Logic Theorist 1956-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
15. The Dartmouth workshop 1956-06-18T00:00:00Z CE
16. LISP 1958-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
17. Rosenblatt's perceptron 1958-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
18. The General Problem Solver 1959-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
19. Unimate, the first industrial robot 1961-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
20. ELIZA 1966-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
21. Shakey the robot 1966-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
22. Minsky and Papert's Perceptrons 1969-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
23. SHRDLU 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
24. Prolog 1972-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
25. The Lighthill report 1973-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
26. MYCIN 1975-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
27. The neocognitron 1980-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
28. XCON earns its keep 1980-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
29. Japan's Fifth Generation project 1982-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
30. Hopfield networks 1982-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
31. Backpropagation popularized 1986-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
32. The Lisp machine market collapses 1987-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
33. Probabilistic reasoning 1988-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
34. Convolutional networks read zip codes 1989-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
35. TD-Gammon 1992-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
36. Support vector machines 1995-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
37. Long short-term memory 1997-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
38. Deep Blue beats Kasparov 1997-05-11T00:00:00Z CE
39. Roomba 2002-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
40. Stanley wins the DARPA Grand Challenge 2005-10-08T00:00:00Z CE
41. Deep belief networks 2006-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
42. ImageNet 2009-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
43. Watson wins Jeopardy! 2011-02-16T00:00:00Z CE
44. Siri 2011-10-04T00:00:00Z CE
45. AlexNet wins ImageNet 2012-09-30T00:00:00Z CE
46. Deep Q-networks play Atari 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
47. word2vec 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
48. Generative adversarial networks 2014-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
49. Sequence-to-sequence learning and attention 2014-01-01T00:00:00Z CE
50. Residual networks 2015-12-01T00:00:00Z CE