In 1834, Charles Babbage conceived a programmable general-purpose computing engine, later called the Analytical Engine.
AI timeline
How artificial intelligence evolved: from scientific foundations to modern capabilities.
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Events
Found: 27
1834
1843
In 1843, Ada Lovelace published notes describing a sequence of operations for computing Bernoulli numbers on the proposed Analytical Engine. She also considered operations on other objects whose relationships could be expressed in a suitable formal representation.
1847
George Boole presented an algebraic approach to logic, allowing propositions and arguments to be analyzed through equations.
1879
Gottlob Frege presented a formal language of relations and quantification with an axiomatic calculus. It allowed reasoning with nested quantifiers to be expressed explicitly.
1901
Karl Pearson formulated principal component analysis (PCA) as approximating data through projections that minimize the sum of squared errors.
1911
In Animal Intelligence: Experimental Studies, Thorndike presented the law of effect: satisfaction or discomfort accompanying or closely following a response changes its likelihood of recurring in the same situation.
1920
In his 1920 paper, Skolem uses functions that select witnesses for each tuple of universally quantified variables in a proof of satisfiability over a finite or countably infinite domain.
1924
In September 1924, Mathematische Annalen published Schönfinkel’s paper on eliminating bound variables using combinators.
1930
Herbrand showed that an entailment from a first-order knowledge base can be proved using a finite subset of its ground instances.
Gödel published a proof of completeness for first-order logic: every logically valid formula has a formal proof.
1932
Church’s paper “A Set of Postulates for the Foundation of Logic” appeared in Annals of Mathematics. It described a logical system using lambda notation to represent sets.
1935
Gerhard Gentzen developed natural deduction and sequent calculus and proved the cut-elimination theorem.
1936
Turing described a machine capable of reading encoded descriptions of other machines and reproducing their computations.
Fisher used iris data in his work on discriminant analysis and introduced the term discriminant function.
1940
In 1940, Alonzo Church presented a formulation of simple type theory with functions as primitive objects and lambda notation as its sole variable-binding mechanism.
1943
In December 1943, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts published a logical account of neural networks. They showed how to construct networks that realize logical expressions under specified conditions.
1949
In The Organization of Behavior (1949), Donald Hebb proposed that a neuron’s repeated or persistent participation in firing another neuron increases its effectiveness in doing so.
Metropolis and Ulam presented a statistical approach to difficult computations: examining a random sample of trials or trajectories instead of calculating every possibility.
1950
In Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Turing proposed replacing the question “Can machines think?” with a game in which an interrogator judges a machine's written answers.
Shannon published a chess-program design combining position evaluation with minimax move selection. He also described selective search as a way to reduce enumeration.
1953
Metropolis and colleagues described sampling configurations from the Boltzmann distribution through random particle displacements with acceptance or rejection of proposed moves.
1954
Martin Davis implemented Presburger's decision procedure in a program that performed an automated proof.
On January 7, 1954, IBM and Georgetown University publicly demonstrated automatic translation of Russian sentences into English on an IBM 701.
In September 1954, B. G. Farley and W. A. Clark published a study of a digitally simulated self-organizing network. Starting from a random initial state, it learned to distinguish two fixed input patterns by changing connection weights.
1955
Arthur Prior published the first study of his tense logic, introducing future-time operators into propositional calculus.
The proposal dated August 31, 1955 outlined a shared research program in artificial intelligence. It initiated the 1956 Dartmouth summer research project.
According to Newell and Simon, the first successful hand simulation of a theorem proof using methods later incorporated into Logic Theorist took place on December 15, 1955.