Timeline: The History of AI

TIMELINE HISTORY

OF AI Think AI’s a new thing? Think again, as we look to the history books

1763

BAYES

Yes, 1763. George Grenville takes office as the British prime minister. Haydn composes his Symphony No 13. And Thomas Bayes writes An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances, which would underpin Bayes’ Theorem. The maths behind AI is born.

1913 1950

MARKOV

Andrey Markov describes his technique for stochastic modelling, sequencing event probability based on previous known events. The mathematician’s explanation will lead to Markov chains, which are central to modelling real-world processes in statistical form.

TURING

Alan Turing puts forward his idea for a ‘learning machine’ that could become artificially intelligent. The Turing test, or imitation game, proposed how a machine might be able to evaluate data like a human. Turing’s 1950 paper opens with the words: “I propose to consider the question ‘Can machines think?’”

1952 1989 2009

GAMES COMMERCIALISATION

Arthur Samuel begins designing programmes that can play chequers. In 1963, Donald Michie develops a ‘machine’ to play noughts and crosses using reinforcement learning. Backgammon came in 1992. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov at chess. et? Axcelis releases Evolver, the first commercialised software package for PC to use a genetic algorithm. While the original software is not part of the permanent collection at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, also home to Google, Evolver has been developed and sold ever since.

IMAGENET

It’s contentious in many ways, but ImageNet is also widely credited with ushering in the AI boom of the 21st century. The brainchild of Fei-Fei Li, it is a colossal image database used to train machine learning algorithms with realworld data.