AI

The long road to machines that reason — from Aristotle's syllogisms to today's frontier models.

24 posts· 350 BCE – 1997

• Deep Blue beats Kasparov: the night the clock ran out on chess as a hard problem 1997
• Support-vector networks: the margin that held for fifteen years 1995
• Hidden Markov models, 1989: probability beats the rule books 1989
• The second AI winter 1987
• Backpropagation, 1986: the algorithm that revived neural networks 1986
• Cyc: Douglas Lenat's thirty-year project to hand-write common sense 1984
• MYCIN, or the physician who never saw a patient 1972
• SHRDLU, 1970: the blocks world where a machine first appeared to understand 1970
• Minsky and Papert draw the line a perceptron cannot cross 1969
• Rosenblatt's perceptron: the machine that could learn 1958
• John McCarthy builds LISP, and AI gets its first native language 1958
• Dartmouth, 1956: the summer that named a field 1956
• The Logic Theorist: a machine that proved theorems before AI had a name 1956
• Samuel's checkers player: the program that coined machine learning 1956
• Turing's imitation game 1950
• Shannon's chess paper and the problem it was really solving 1950
• McCulloch and Pitts, or a mind made of thresholds 1943
• Turing's machine, or the question no algorithm can answer 1936
• Frege's Begriffsschrift 1879
• Boole's algebra of thought 1854
• Leibniz's calculus ratiocinator, or let us calculate who is right 1679
• Llull's Ars Magna, or how a troubadour built the first reasoning machine 1305
• Al-Jazari's musicians, or the first machine you could reprogram 1206
• The Prior Analytics, or the first argument written in letters 350 BCE