The development of artificial intelligence has been shaped by several key moments over the years, from the creation of the first chatbot in 1965 to the defeat of a world chess champion in 1997 and the emergence of deep learning in 2012.
Moments that Shaped AI
- 1956: The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence coins the name of a new field concerned with making software smart like humans.
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1965: Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT creates Eliza, the first chatbot, which poses as a psychotherapist.
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1975: Meta-Dendral, a program developed at Stanford to interpret chemical analyses, makes the first discoveries by a computer to be published in a refereed journal.
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1987: A Mercedes van fitted with two cameras and a bunch of computers drives itself 20 kilometers along a German highway at more than 55 mph, in an academic project led by engineer Ernst Dickmanns.
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1997: IBM’s computer Deep Blue defeats chess world champion Garry Kasparov.
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2004: The Pentagon stages the Darpa Grand Challenge, a race for robot cars in the Mojave Desert that catalyzes the autonomous-car industry.
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2012: Researchers in a niche field called deep learning spur new corporate interest in AI by showing their ideas can make speech and image recognition much more accurate.
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2016: AlphaGo, created by Google unit DeepMind, defeats a world champion player of the board game Go.
