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The intellectual roots of AI, and the concept of intelligent machines, may be found in Greek mythology. Intelligent artifacts appear in literature since then, with real (and fraudulent) mechanical devices actually demonstrating behaviour with some degree of intelligence. After modern computers became available following World War II, it has become possible to create programs that perform difficult intellectual tasks. Even more importantly, general purpose methods and tools have been created that allow similar tasks to be performed.
A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence. By Bruce G. Buchanan, University Professor Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh. A chronology of significant events in the history of AI, prepared for the Introduction to AI class at the University of Pittsburgh. Timeline of Computer History from The Computer Museum History Center. "This timeline explores the history of computing from 1945 to 1994. Each year features illustrated descriptions of significant innovations in hardware and software technology, as well as milestones in areas such as commercial applications and artificial intelligence. When appropriate, biographical sketches of the pioneers responsible for the advances are included." The photos are sure to capture the attention of your students. Timeline from The History of Computing Project. Major developments in the chronology of computing, with images and brief descriptions. Also contains links to many biographies and original papers. Timeline: Real robots - "Robots are not new. They have been around for centuries in various forms. Here's a brief overview of the development of both robots and computers." From BBC News. AIC Timeline: "The Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International has been a center of excellence and innovation for over thirty-five years. The Center has made many important contributions to the AI field over the years, and new advances continue to be made. This timeline shows just a few of the AI Center's major achievements and milestones." Artificial Intelligence History. A detailed timeline from Stottler Henke Associates, Inc. Timeline for the Evolution of Cybernetics. From the American Society for Cybernetics' (ACS) History of Cybernetics. "Cybernetics precipitated out of diverse threads of work fortuitously intersecting during the 1940's. In the ensuing decades, the themes circumscribing cybernetics' original definition diverged again to engender or facilitate the rise of an even greater diversity of fields, labels, and disciplines. ... [The timeline] is deliberately intended to reflect at least a sample of the many subjects and disciplines from which cybernetics descended and into which its themes subsequently flowed." Early Calculators and Vintage Machines. A listing of sources of information and museum collections compiled by the Charles Babbage Institute. Machine Translation's Past and Future. A timeline covering the span from 1629 through the year 2264! Compiled by Kristin Demos and Mark Frauenfelder (Wired, 8.05 - May 2000). Milestones in the Development of Artificial Intelligence. By Mark Kantrowitz.
A (Very) Brief History of Artificial Intelligence. By Bruce G. Buchanan. AI Magazine 26(4): Winter 2005, 53�60. "In this brief history, the beginnings of artificial intelligence are traced to philosophy, fiction, and imagination. Early inventions in electronics, engineering, and many other disciplines have influenced AI. Some early milestones include work on problem solving, including basic work in learning, knowledge representation, and inference as well as demonstration programs in language understanding, translation, theorem proving, associative memory, and knowledge-based systems. The article ends with a brief examination of influential organizations and current issues facing the field." AI@50: AI Magazine 27(4): Winter 2006. Articles include:
AI Magazine's Special 25th Anniversary Issue, 26(4): Winter 2005. As stated in David Leake's Editorial Introduction: "The year 2005 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. This special issue celebrates the anniversary by presenting perspectives on AAAI's history, on the future of AAAI, and on the past and future of artificial intelligence. It highlights the many voices contributing to AAAI by featuring personal remembrances and visions from many people, including founders of AAAI, presidents who guided the society's development, and others spurring on AI research and applications. While a single issue can only scratch the surface, this special issue clearly illustrates the spirit, accomplishment, and optimism that will drive the next 25 years." The Big Picture - A Short History of Robotics and Thinking Machines. Part of the teaching guide for the Scientific American Frontiers in the classroom series: ROBOTS ALIVE!
Over the holidays 50 years ago, two scientists hatched artificial intelligence. By Byron Spice. post-gazette.com (January 2, 2006). "Fifty years ago, Herbert A. Simon and Allen Newell had a Christmas break story that would top them all. 'Over the Christmas holiday,' Dr. Simon famously blurted to one of his classes at Carnegie Institute of Technology, 'Al Newell and I invented a thinking machine.' It was another way of saying that they had invented artificial intelligence -- in fact, the only way of saying it in the winter of 1955-56 because no one had gotten around to inventing the term 'artificial intelligence.'" A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. J. McCarthy, M. L. Minsky, N. Rochester, and C.E. Shannon. August 31, 1955. "We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it." And this marks the debut of the term "artificial intelligence."
The very early days. An interview (available in PDF, Quicktime, and Realmedia) with Donald Michie, Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, and currently a visitor at NSW University of Technology. "Interested in AI from 1942, Donald Michie conceived, founded and directed the UK's first AI laboratory at Edinburgh, and has since been active in AI projects around the World. ... His talk will cover the period from 1942, when Alan Turing was a colleague at Bletchley Park, up to 1965, when the Edinburgh AI laboratory was truly launched. He will cover the theories, the practice, the personalities and the politics, and on past form may be expected to do so without pulling any punches." This is just one of the 4 presentations given at the October 2002 seminar, Artificial Intelligence - Recollections of the Pioneers. Claude E. Shannon: Founder of Information Theory. By Graham P. Collins. Scientific American Explore (October 14, 2002). "Shannon's M.I.T. master's thesis in electrical engineering has been called the most important of the 20th century: in it the 22-year-old Shannon showed how the logical algebra of 19th-century mathematician George Boole could be implemented using electronic circuits of relays and switches. This most fundamental feature of digital computers' design -- the representation of 'true' and 'false' and '0' and '1' as open or closed switches, and the use of electronic logic gates to make decisions and to carry out arithmetic -- can be traced back to the insights in Shannon's thesis." Recovering MIT's AI Film History - Early Artificial Intelligence Research Caught on Film. "Here you will find a chronology of some of AI's most influential projects and how they worked. It is intended for both non-scientists and those ready to continue experimentation and research tomorrow. Included is a taste of who the main players have been, concepts they and their projects have explored and how the goals of AI have evolved and changed over time. Many will be surprised that some of what we now consider standard tools like search engines, spell check and spam filters are all outcroppings of AI research."
An early look at artificial Intelligence. The Computer Chronicles (1984 television broadcast) / video available from The Internet Archive. "Guests include Edward Feigenbaum of Stanford University, Nils Nilsson of the AI Center at SRI International, Tom Kehler of Intellegenetics, Herb Lechner of SRI, and John McCarthy of Stanford. Featured demonstrations include Inferential Knowledge Engineering and the programming language LISP."
Robots/ Mechanical Life. NPR Talk of the Nation: Science Friday With Ira Flatow (August 30, 2002). "This week, an automated convenience store opened in Washington. This robo-mart dispenses snacks, toiletries, and even DVDs. From housekeeping to the battlefield to your neighborhood convenience store, researchers are creating robots to live with us and work for us. In this hour, we'll look at how robots may change our lives. Plus, early attempts to create mechanical life." Guests: Rodney Brooks & Gaby Wood. You can listen to the radio broadcast by clicking here.
Genius on the Block - The foundations of the computing age go up for auction. By Stephen Cass. IEEE Spectrum (July 2005).
The Discovery of the Artificial: Behavior, Mind and Machines Before an Beyond Cybernetics. By Roberto Cordeschi. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 2002. As stated in the introduction available online from the author): "The 'discovery' in the title of this book refers to the coming of age of a new concept of the machine. This concept is at the core of a methodology that profoundly influenced the sciences of the mind and behavior in the twentieth century. The main ambition of this methodology was to overcome, through that new concept of the machine, traditional oppositions between the inorganic and organic worlds, between the laws that govern the behavior of physical systems and those that govern the behavior of organisms, and between causal and teleological explanation. The origins of this methodology are usually traced back to the middle of the 1940s, with the advent of cybernetics, which Norbert Wiener described, in his 1948 book, as the study of 'control and communication in the animal and the machine.' ... One of my central claims is that certain basic features of the simulative methodology whose origins are usually put no further back than cybernetics, actually go back in significant ways to the early decades of the twentieth century."
Knowledge Processing -- From File Servers to Knowledge Servers. By Edward Feigenbaum. "This chapter from Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Intelligent Machines (published in 1990) addresses the history and development of AI, and where it was headed, circa 1990." Excerpt: "Like all creators, scientists and technologists must dream, must put forth a vision, or else they relegate their work to almost pointless incrementalism. ... The early dreaming included dreams about intelligent behavior at very high levels of competence. Turing speculated on wide-ranging conversations between people and machines and on chess playing programs. Later Newell and Simon wrote about champion-level chess programs and began their work toward that end. Samuel (checker playing), Gelernter (geometry-theorem proving), and others shared the dream. At Stanford, Lederberg and I chose reasoning in science as our task and began work with Buchanan and Djerassi on building a program that would elucidate chemical structure at a high level of competence: the DENDRAL program." AI Matures and Flourishes in North America. By David Mike Hamilton, Tom M. Mitchell, and Carol M. Hamilton. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 18(4): 87-88, c3 (July/August 2003). "Separate artificial intelligence organizations in North America have existed for nearly 40 years. From humble beginnings,when a small interest group served the field, to today,when AI groups serve every niche, AI is flourishing.The oldest AI organization in the region is SIGART, the Association for Computing Machinery�s Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence. SIGART began publishing a newsletter for its members in the mid 1960s...." AI's Greatest Trends and Controversies. Marti A. Hearst and Haym Hirsh, Editors. IEEE Intelligent Systems (January/February 2000). A timely and thought provoking collection of views from AI scholars and practitioners. The History of Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh University: a Perspective. By Jim Howe (June 2007 revision). "The Department of Artificial Intelligence can trace its origins to a small research group established in a flat at 4 Hope Park Square in 1963 by Donald Michie, then Reader in Surgical Science. During the Second World War, through his membership of Max Newman's code-breaking group at Bletchley Park, Michie had been introduced to computing and had come to believe in the possibility of building machines that could think and learn. By the early 1960s, the time appeared to be ripe to embark on this endeavour." Early Artificial Intelligence Projects - A Student Perspective by Heather Knight (August 2006). Part of NSF's Recovering MIT's AI Film History Project Created at CSAIL. "Unlike many fields, Artificial Intelligence has not had a linear progression and its research and breakthroughs have not grown toward an easily identified Sun. Computing, in contrast, has been noted for its exponential growth and improvement characterized by Moore's law, 'the empirical observation that the complexity of integrated circuits, with respect to minimum component cost, doubles every 24 months' (wikipedia). The path of AI, however, more resembles the intertwining world wide web, spiraling out and looping back in many directions. Here you will find a rough chronology of some of AI's most influential projects. It is intended for both non-scientists and those ready to continue experimentation and research tomorrow. Included is a taste of who the main players have been, concepts they and their projects have explored and how the goals of AI have evolved and changed over time. Many will be surprised that some of what we now consider obvious tools like search engines, spell check and spam filters are all outcroppings of AI research." In Pursuit of Mind: The Research of Allen Newell. By John E. Laird and Paul S. Rosenbloom. AI Magazine 13(4): Winter 1992, 17-45. "Allen Newell was one of the founders and truly great scientists of AI. His contributions included foundational concepts and ground-breaking systems. His career was defined by the pursuit of a single, fundamental issue: the nature of the human mind. This article traces his pursuit from his early work on search and list processing in systems such as the LOGIC THEORIST and the GENERAL PROBLEM SOLVER; through his work on problem spaces, human problem solving, and production systems; through his final work on unified theories of cognition and SOAR." Included within the article is a remembrance of Allen Newell written by Herbert Simon. Lighthill Controversy Debate at the Royal Institution with Professor Sir James Lighthill, Professor Donald Michie, Professor Richard Gregory and Professor John McCarthy. BBC TV (June 1973) / video available in several formats from AIAI, The University of Edinburgh's Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute. MIT Laboratory for Computer Science's timeline of major milestones.
The Discipline and Future of Machine Learning. Video of Tom Mitchell's March 1, 2007 seminar talk at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science's Machine Learning Department: "Over the past 50 years the study of machine learning has grown from the efforts of a handful of computer engineers exploring whether computers could learn to play games, and a field of statistics that largely ignored computational considerations, to a broad discipline that has produced fundamental statistical-computational theories of learning processes, has designed learning algorithms that are routinely used in commercial systems from speech recognition to computer vision, and has spun off an industry in data mining to discover hidden regularities in the growing volume of online data." Developments in Artificial Intelligence, Chapter 9 of Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Committee on Innovations in Computing and Communications: Lessons from History, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications, National Research Council. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999. "Thus, the activities surrounding the [1956] Dartmouth workshop were, at the outset, linked with the cutting-edge research at a leading private research laboratory (AT&T Bell Laboratories) and a rapidly emerging industrial giant (IBM). Researchers at Bell Laboratories and IBM nurtured the earliest work in AI and gave young academic researchers like McCarthy and Minsky credibility that might otherwise have been lacking. Moreover, the Dartmouth summer research project in AI was funded by private philanthropy and by industry, not by government. The same is true for much of the research that led up to the summer project." The Great 1980s AI Bubble: A Review of The Brain Makers, by H.P. Newquist. Book review by Hans Moravec. AI Magazine 15(3): Fall 1994, 86-87. Whatever happened to machines that think? By Justin Mullins. New Scientist (April 23, 2005; Issue 2496: pages 32 - 37). "This early success contributed to a sense of optimism that the problems of AI could be overcome, much of it based on the idea that some kind of grand unified theory of mind would emerge that would offer up a scheme to create artificial intelligence on a platter. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw feverish speculation about the impact intelligent machines might have on the world and the advantages they would bring to whoever developed them. The computer HAL in Stanley Kubrick's classic 1968 movie 2001: A space odyssey summed up the visions being debated, and the fears they conjured up. It was against this backdrop that Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry announced, in 1982, a programme called the Fifth Generation Computer Systems project to develop massively parallel computers that would take computing and AI to a new level. ... An arms race of sorts ensued in which the US and Japan vied for supremacy." [Note: A brief history of AI timeline appears at the end of the article.] How Portugal Celebrated AI's 50th Anniversary. By Carlos Ramos. IEEE Intelligent Systems 21(4): July/August 2006, 86-88. This article describes the celebration and related museum exhibition, and also provides a brief history of AI in Portugal: "Lu�s Moniz Pereira is considered the father of AI in Portugal. In 1966, as an undergraduate student, he created the Center for Cybernetics Studies. ..."
Tools for Thought. The 1985 edition of Howard Rheingold's book is available online. (The revised 2000 edition is available from the MIT Press.) As stated by the author on each chapter page: "The idea that people could use computers to amplify thought and communication, as tools for intellectual work and social activity, was not an invention of the mainstream computer industry or orthodox computer science, nor even homebrew computerists; their work was rooted in older, equally eccentric, equally visionary, work. You can't really guess where mind-amplifying technology is going unless you understand where it came from." The Age of Female Computers. David Skinner reviews When Computers Were Human, by David Alan Grier. The New Atlantis (Spring 2006). "Long before the dawn of calculators and inexpensive desktop computers, the grinding work of large problems had to be broken up into discrete, simple parts and done by hand. Where scads of numbers needed computing -- for astronomical purposes at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, or to establish the metric system at the Bureau du Cadastre in Paris -- such work was accomplished factory-style. ... The most famous modern example of such work is probably Los Alamos, where scientists� wives were recruited in the early stages to compute long math problems for the Manhattan Project. ... The social history of pre-machine computing is also interesting in light of contemporary debates about gender and scientific achievement, and here Grier�s reconsideration of the past sheds useful light on the present. In the history of computing, the humbler levels of scientific work were open, even welcoming, to women. Indeed, by the early twentieth century computing was thought of as women�s work and computers were assumed to be female. ... Richard Feynman, then a junior staff member at Los Alamos, arranged a showdown between man and machine, pitting a group of human computers against the Los Alamos IBM facility with both performing a calculation for the plutonium bomb. For two days, the human computers were able to keep up with the machines. 'But on the third day,' recalled one observer, 'the punched-card machine operation began to move decisively ahead, as the people performing the hand computing could not sustain their initial fast pace, while the machines did not tire.' Shortly after the war, the machines took over; their human accompanists were now 'operators' and 'programmers.'" Book Review: M. Mitchell Waldrop's "The Dream Machine - J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal." By Bob Spinrad. Wired (October 2001/9.10). "Yet Lick insisted that computers had to connect to people on people's terms, not the machines'. The interface had to be intuitive. Expressed most vividly in his 1960 paper 'Man-Computer Symbiosis,' Lick's visions seem boringly familiar today: personal computers, graphical interfaces, voice interaction, the Internet (he called it the Intergalactic Computer Network), online reference sources, and what we now call intelligent agents."
A short history of the computer. Technology Research News. "The first general purpose electronic computer appeared more than half a century ago. The Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC), which contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, required 1,800 square feet to rest its bulk, and cost three quarters of a million dollars, was the culmination of centuries of advances in computational devices, mathematics and electronics. ... The first graphics program, Sketchpad, was developed by Ivan Sutherland at MIT in 1962. The first computer game, Spacewar!, also emerged at MIT around the same time."
Women in the History of Computer Science - "A panel of pioneers of the 1940s and 1950s discusses their experiences which range from programming the world's first computing machines to developing biomedical and graphical applications for computers. This video provides an opportunity to hear and learn the hidden history of the period and confirm that Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper were not the only female contributors to the rich history of computing!" A video from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing collection provided by ResearchChannel. Online Articles about Ancient Precursors to AIFrom Gutenberg to the Internet Timeline - An Annotated Chronology of the History of Information from about 30,000 B.C.E. to the present. By Jeremy M. Norman. Timeline. From The Age of Spiritual Machines, by Raymond Kurzweil. It covers the period from "10-15 billion years ago" to "2099 ... [and] Some many millenniums hence." In search of lost time - The ancient Antikythera Mechanism doesn't just challenge our assumptions about technology transfer over the ages -- it gives us fresh insights into history itself. By Jo Marchant. news@nature.com (November 29, 2006). "This thing spent 2,000 years at the bottom of the sea before making it to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, and it shows. ... This is the Antikythera Mechanism. These fragments contain at least 30 interlocking gear-wheels, along with copious astronomical inscriptions. Before its sojourn on the sea bed, it computed and displayed the movement of the Sun, the Moon and possibly the planets around Earth, and predicted the dates of future eclipses. It's one of the most stunning artefacts we have from classical antiquity. ... 'It's the same way that we would do things today, it's like modern technology,' says [Yanis] Bitsakis. 'That's why it fascinates people.' What fascinates me is that where we see the potential of that technology to measure time accurately and make machines do work, the Greeks saw a way to demonstrate the beauty of the heavens and get closer to the gods."
The programmable robot of ancient Greece. By Noel Sharkey (Professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield, UK. His forthcoming book is called The Tin Man). New Scientist (July 7, 2007; Issue 2611: pages 32-35; subscription req'd). "Constructing a mechanical lion that could walk, let alone present flowers to the king, can't have been a simple task back in 1515 - even for a genius like Leonardo da Vinci. How he managed this feat remained a mystery until 2000, when US robotics expert Mark Rosheim came to a surprising conclusion. ... [W]as da Vinci influenced by an earlier design? And if so, how far back in history can we trace programmable robots? In search of answers I followed the technology back through medieval Europe to the Islamic world, where I have found evidence of an even earlier programmable automaton, made in Baghdad by the brilliant 13th-century engineer Ibn Ismail Ibn al-Razzaz Al-Jazari. ... Yet the trail doesn't stop there. It led me even further back past the automata of the Byzantine court and ancient Rome to ancient Alexandria. It was here that Hero, one of the greatest Greek engineers, constructed a programmable robot that pre-dates da Vinci's by 1500 years. ... So what exactly do we mean by 'programmable'? ..." Ramon Lull and the Infidels. By Clark Glymour, Kenneth M. Ford and Patrick J. Hayes. AI Magazine 19(2): Summer 1998, 1998, 136. "Many of the fundamental ideas in artificial intelligence have an ancient heritage. Some of the most fundamental, surely, are that thinking is a computational process, that computational processes involve combining symbols, that computation can be made mechanical, and that the mathematics of computation involves combinatorics. All of these ideas have their origin, so far as we know, in the work of an eccentric 13th century Spanish genius, Ramón Lull (1232-1316). Lull's sources were partly mystical, but the interesting part of his thought drew from - or against - an analytic tradition in logic and combinatorics." Monster in a Box - The inside story of an ingenious chess-playing machine that thrilled crowds, terrified opponents, and won like clockwork. By Tom Standage. Wired (March 2002; Issue 10.03).
Simulacra - The Early History of Talking Machines, which begins with the statement: "The earliest speaking machines were perceived as the heretical works of magicians and thus as attempts to defy god." Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life. By Gaby Wood. Faber, 2002. Book extract available online from The Observer: "The 18th-century mechanician, Jacques de Vaucanson, made 'robots' that were capable of playing musical instruments as melodiously as human beings - but it was his incontinent duck that has fascinated down the ages." The Dream of Mechanical Life - Man and automata. By Hugh Ormsby-Lennon. The Weekly Standard (December 23, 2002 Volume 008, Issue 15). "A spate of new books [editor's note: 13 booksto be exact] addresses eighteenth-century automata, ventriloquists' dummies, and puppets--together with more recent avatars of chess computers, artificial intelligence, androids, robots, and cyborgs. Does 'computerization' challenge human identity as ominously as 'mechanization' previously seemed to? ... So, does artificial intelligence transcend Freudian nightmare now that it has come to suggest not itinerant showmen or tinkerers with clockwork but university scientists, computer moguls, and global corporations? Or does a scientist with an uncanny puppet always remain mad or charlatanical?" AI: Early History and Applications. Chapter One of George F. Luger's textbook, Artificial Intelligence: Structures and Strategies for Complex Problem Solving, 5th Edition (Addison-Wesley; 2005), is available online. "As one of the originators of the science of operations research, as well as the designer of the first programmable mechanical computing machines, Charles Babbage, a nineteenth century mathematician, may also be considered an early practitioner of artificial intelligence (Morrison and Morrison 1961). Babbage's difference engine was a special-purpose machine for computing the values of certain polynomial functions and was the forerunner of his analytical engine. The analytical engine, designed but not successfully constructed during his lifetime, was a general-purpose programmable computing machine that presaged many of the architectural assumptions underlying the modern computer." The man-machine and artificial intelligence. By Bruce Mazlish, Department of History, MIT. In Constructions of the Mind--Artificial Intelligence and the Humanities. A special issue of the Stanford Humanities Review 4(2): Spring 1995. Stefano Franchi and Guven Guzeldere, editors. "In the history of mechanical contrivances, it is difficult to know how many of the automata of antiquity were constructed only in legend or by actual scientific artifice. Icarus's wings melt in the light of historical inquiry, as they were reputed to do in the myth; but was the flying automaton, attributed to a Chinese scientist of c. 380 BC actually in the air for three days, as related? (The same story is told of Archytas of Tarentum.) The mix of fact and fiction is a subject of critical importance for the history of science and technology; for our purposes, the aspirations of semi-mythical inventors can be as revealing as their actual embodiment in levers and gears."
Vannevar Bush: As We May Think (Atlantic Monthly, July 1945) -- A vision of the future in which computers assist humans in many activities. John McCarthy: Programs with Common Sense (1959). "This paper will discuss programs to manipulate in a suitable formal language (most likely a part of the predicate calculus) common instrumental statements. The basic program will draw immediate conclusions from a list of premises. These conclusions will be either declarative or imperative sentences. When an imperative sentence is deduced the program takes a corresponding action. These actions may include printing sentences, moving sentences on lists, and reinitiating the basic deduction process on these lists." Marvin Minsky: A Framework for Representing Knowledge (1974). "Here is the essence of the theory: When one encounters a new situation ... one selects from memory a structure called a Frame. This is a remembered framework to be adapted to fit reality by changing details as necessary." Claude Shannon: A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948) . A.M. Turing: "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950). -- Introduction of Turing Test as a way of operationalizing a test of intelligent behavior.
AAAI Fellows: The American Association for Artificial Intelligence's Fellows program was started in 1990 to recognize individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions---usually over at least a ten-year period---to the field of artificial intelligence.
AI@50, the Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Conference: The Next Fifty Years (AI@50) to honor the fiftieth anniversary of the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project. The AI Genealogy Project - a service of the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin, Benjamin Kuipers, Director. As stated in the Mission Statement: "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a small but remarkably interdisciplinary field. It draws especially on computer science, mathematics, electrical, control, and mechanical engineering, cognitive, perceptual, and developmental psychology, linguistics, and philosophy, among other fields. AI is made up of a highly diverse collection of intellectual threads.... [W]e believe that the data will be a useful resource for historians and social scientists studying the nature of science. Intellectual influence among scientists is an immensely rich and complex relation." Carnegie Mellon University Libraries Computer Science Archives. "Artificial intelligence and computer science are two of the strongest research areas within the Carnegie Mellon University Archives. Collections include university records pertaining to integration of computers into the academic sector and papers of internationally influential faculty members. The Archives is the repository for the papers of Professors Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon." The archive also contains the Pamela McCorduck Collection and the Arie Nicolaas (Nico) Habermann Collection.
"The Charles Babbage Institute is an historical archives and research center of the University of Minnesota. CBI is dedicated to promoting study of the history of information technology and information processing and their impact on society." Don't miss their collection of oral histories. The Computer Conservation Socitey (UK). "The Society was formed in 1989 as an initiative between the British Computer Society and the Science Museum of London. It was a time when the computer industry had existed for about half a century, and when many people had spent a professional lifetime in the industry. The industry had matured, but was still poised for ever greater technological and social changes as it had been from its beginnings in the 1940s. It was time to take stock and reflect on the extraordinary developments to date, and in particular, to be concerned that many of the pioneering people and hardware and software were fast disappearing."
History of Lisp: Web site devoted to the history of the language.
McCarthy, John. 1978. History of LISP. In History of Programming Languages: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference, 1978, ed. Wexenblatt, R. L., 173-197. New York: Academic Press, 1981. Computer History Collection at The Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Computer History Museum, "the world's largest and most significant history museum for preserving and presenting the computing revolution and its impact on the human experience. It allows you to discover how computing became the amplifier for our minds and changed the way we work, live and play."
Courses in the History of Computing. A list of universities offering courses in the history of computing compiled by Professor Martin Campbell-Kelly, Department of Computer Science,University of Warwick. History of Computing, maintained by John Impagliazzo, Professor of Computer Science, Hofstra University, New York. Collections include: Computing Museums and Useful History Sites. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. "From the analytical engine to the supercomputer, from Pascal to von Neumann, from punched cards to CD-ROMs -- the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing covers the breadth of computer history. Featuring scholarly articles by leading computer scientists and historians, as well as firsthand accounts by computer pioneers, the Annals is the primary publication for recording, analyzing, and debating the history of computing. The Annals also serves as a focal point for people interested in uncovering and preserving the records of this exciting field. The quarterly publication is an active center for the collection and dissemination of information on historical projects and organizations, oral history activities, and international conferences."
Software History Center. "The Software History Center is dedicated to preserving the history of the software industry, one of the largest and most influential industries in the world today. The industry originated with the entrepreneurial computer software and services companies of the 1950s and 1960s, grew dramatically through the 1970s and 1980s to become a market force rivaling that of the computer hardware companies, and by the 1990s had become the supplier of technical know-how that transformed the way people worked, played and communicated every day of their lives. The SHC is working to preserve for future generations information about the companies, people, products, and events that shaped the evolution of this vital industry." See our Wellspring Initiative Other References OfflineBoden, Margaret A. 1995. .AI Magazine 16(4): Winter 1995, 96-99. "The first 50 years of AI are reviewed, and current controversies outlined. Scientific disputes include disagreements over the best research methodology, including classical AI, connectionism, hybrid systems, and situated and evolutionary robotics. Philosophical disputes concern (for instance) whether computation is necessary and sufficient for mentality, whether representations are essential for intelligence, whether consciousness can be explained objectively, and whether the Cartesian presuppositions of (most) AI should be replaced by a neo-Heideggerian approach. With respect to final verdicts, both juries (scientific and philosophical) are still out. But AI has aided theoretical psychology and revivified the philosophy of mind." Buchanan, Bruce G. 1983. Introduction to the COMTEX Microfiche Edition of Memos from the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. AI Magazine4 (4): Winter 1983, 37-41. Cohen, Jonathan. 1967. Human Robots in Myth and Science. New York: A.S. Barnes. (Earlier printing: 1966, London: Allen and Unwin.) Crevier, Daniel. 1993. AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence. New York: Basic Books of Harper Collins Publishers. Dean, Thomas, James Allen, and Yiannis Aloimonos. 1995. Artificial Intelligence: Theory and Practice. Redwood City, CA: The Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Co., Inc. The end of each subject-oriented chapter gives a thumbnail sketch of major contributors in special fields within AI. Feigenbaum, Edward A., and Julian Feldman., editors. 1995. Computers and Thought. AAAI Press. This book, originally published in 1963, contains twenty classic papers by pioneers in the field of AI. Freitas, Robert A. Jr. and William P. Gilbreath, eds. Advanced Automation for Space Missions. Proceedings of the 1980 NASA/ASEE Summer Study (NASA Conference Publication 2255). Portions of the report are available online, including the Introduction: "This document is the final report of a study on the feasibility of using machine intelligence, including automation and robotics, in future space missions. The 10-week study was conducted during the summer of 1980 by 18 educators from universities throughout the United States who worked with 15 NASA program engineers. The specific study objectives were to identify and analyze several representative missions that would require extensive applications of machine intelligence, and then to identify technologies that must be developed to accomplish these types of missions." Some of the other sections available online are Survey of Artificial Intelligence and History of NASA Automation Activities. Gardner, Martin. 1968. Logic Machines, Diagrams, and Boolean Algebra. New York: Dover. Glymour, Clark, Kenneth Ford, and Patrick Hayes. 1995. The Prehistory of Android Epistemology. In Computation and Intelligence: Collected Readings, ed. Luger, George F., 3-21. Menlo Park/Cambridge/London: AAAI Press/The MIT Press. Haigh, Thomas. The History of Computing: An Introduction for the Computer Scientist. In Using History to Teach Computer Science and Related Disciplines ed. Atsushi Akera & William Aspray (Washington, D.C.: Computing Research Association, 2004): 5-26.
Hodges, Andrew. 1983. Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence. New York: Simon & Schuster. Hogan, James P. 1997. Mind Matters: Exploring the World of Artificial Intelligence. New York: Ballantine Publishing Group.
Kowalski, Robert. 1988. The Early Years of Logic Programming. Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 31: 38-43. Kurzweil, Raymond. 1990. In The Age of the Intelligent Machine. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Chapters 1-6 (pp. 1-214). Markoff, John. 2005. What the Dormouse Said - How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. Viking. "An unparalleled history of how technology and the counterculture came together in the 1960s, created the cult of the personal computer, and shaped today's Silicon Valley."
McCarthy, John. 1978. History of LISP. In History of Programming Languages: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference, 1978, ed. Wexenblatt, R. L., 173-197. New York: Academic Press, 1981. McCorduck, Pamela. Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence. A K Peters, Natick, Mass., 2004.
McCorduck, Pamela 1979. Machines Who Think. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company. A fascinating "must-read" that traces the quest for artificial intelligence back to ancient times, and then proceeds though various current topics with readable explanations and lively interview excerpts. Updated in 2004.]
Minsky, Marvin. 1983. Introduction to the COMTEX Microfiche Edition of the Early MIT Artificial Intelligence Memos. AI Magazine 4(1): Spring 1983, 19-22. Moravec, Hans. 1988. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. A lively and accessible overview of the field of robotics from the Director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, including historical development as well as social issues. Newell, Allen. 1984. Introduction to the COMTEX Microfiche Edition of Reports on Artificial Intelligence from Carnegie-Mellon University. AI Magazine5 (3): Fall 1984, 35-39. Newell, Allen. 1983. Some Intellectual Issues in the History of Artificial Intelligence. In The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Machlup, F. and U. Mansfield, 187-227. New York: Wiley. Newell, Allen, and Herbert A. Simon. 1972. Human Problem Solving. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.; Prentice-Hall. Be sure to see the Historical Addendum (pages 873 - 889). Newquist, Harvey P. 1994. The Brain Makers: Genius, Ego and Greed in the Quest for Machines that Think. Sams Publishing, Indianapolis, Indiana. See the review by Hans Moravec. Nilsson, Nils J. 1984. Introduction to the COMTEX Microfiche Edition of the SRI Artificial Intelligence Center: Technical Notes. AI Magazine 5(1): Spring 1984, 41-52. Patterson, Dan W. 1990. Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Chapter 1 (pp. 1-8). Russell, Stuart, and Peter Norvig. 1995. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Chapters 1 and 2 (pp. 1-52) present a readable conceptual analysis of AI, including its history and problems in making an "intelligent agent." Scientific American issue titled, Information. September 1966 (Volume 215, Number 3). Table of contents:
Selfridge, Oliver G. 1993. The Gardens of Learning: A Vision for AI. AI Magazine 14(2): Summer 1993, 36-48. "I have watched AI since its beginnings ... In 1943, I was an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and met a man whom I was soon to be a roommate with. He was but three years older than I, and he was writing what I deem to be the first directed and solid piece of work in AI (McCulloch and Pitts 1943) His name was Walter Pitts, and he had teamed up with a neurophysiologist named Warren McCulloch, who was busy finding out how neurons worked (McCulloch and Pitts 1943)." Shannon, C. E. 1948. A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Bell System Technical Journal 27: 379-423 and 623-656. Selfridge, Oliver G., Richard S. Sutton, and Charles W. Anderson (1988). Selected Bibliography on Connectionism, in Y.C.Lee (ed.) Evolution Learning and Cognition, 391-403. World Scientific. An annotated bibliography of significant papers in the development of connectionist systems. Swade, D. D. 1993. Redeeming Charles Babbage's Mechanical Computer. Scientific American 268 (2): 86-91. Woodbury, David O. 1959. The Translating Machine. The Atlantic Monthly (Volume 204, No. 2; pages 60 - 64). "Professor William N. Locke, head of MIT's modern languages department and a prime mover in machine translation, is not going to be satisfied even with this kind of short cut. He would like to have a machine that will translate material that is merely spoken to it. This is not so fantastic as it sounds." At the AAAI-2000 conference in Austin, a visitor to the AI Topics booth asked if I could provide more information about Hephaestus and Talos. So for him and everyone else who is interested in Greek mythology, here are links to two pages (complete with illustrations) from Carlos Parada's Greek Mythology Link [http://homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/]: |
