1950s

  • 1950: Alan Turing publishes his paper, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, which proposes the very first Turing Test to access a machine’s intelligence
  • Computers at the time were huge, with limited memory, and only really used by the defence, big tech companies and universities.
  • 1956: The Logic Theorist becomes the first proof of concept of artificial intelligence. It was designed to mimic the problem-solving skills of a human.

1950s - 1970s

  • AI research grew, as computers were able to store more information and became faster, smaller, cheaper and more accessible.
  • Early demonstrations of a General Problem Solver program and the ELIZA chatbot showed promise in regard to the goals of problem solving and the interpretation of spoken language, respectively.
  • The government begins investing funds to develop an AI that can comprehend and process natural human language.
  • 1974 - 1980: Due to lack of advancement in the field, AI funds dry up. This period becomes known as The AI Winter.

1980s

  • 1980: The American philosopher John Searle develops the Chinese Room Argument
  • AI receives funding again, and Deep Learning techniques are discovered.
  • Expert systems were automated applications that would ask an expert in a field how to respond in a given situation. Once the answer was learned for virtually every situation, non-experts could receive advice from that program. Expert systems were widely used in industries at that time.

1990s - Present Day

  • Speech recognition software was implemented on Microsoft’s Windows operating system, as the earlier limitations on computer storage were no longer a problem.
  • 1997: Chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue, a supercomputer which uses symbolic AI.
  • 2017: Google’s Alpha Go system defeats Chines Go champion Ke Jie.