| Date | Development |
| 1913 | Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead published Principia Mathematica, which revolutionized formal logic. |
| 1915 | Leonardo Torres y Quevedo built a chess automaton, El Ajedrecista, and published speculation about thinking and automata. |
| 1923 | Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. opened in London. This is the first use of the word "robot" in English. |
| 1920s and 1930s | Ludwig Wittgenstein and Rudolf Carnap led philosophy into logical analysis of knowledge. Alonzo Church developde Lambda Calculus to investigate computability using recursive functional notation. |
| 1931 | Kurt Gödel showed that sufficiently powerful formal systems, if consistent, permit the formulation of true theorems that are unprovable by any theorem-proving machine deriving all possible theorems from the axioms. To do this he had to build a universal, integer-based programming language, which is the reason why he is sometimes called the "father of theoretical computer science". |
| 1940 | Edward Condon displays Nimatron, a digital computer that played Nim perfectly. |
| 1941 | Konrad Zuse built the first working program-controlled computers. |
| 1943 | Warren Sturgis McCulloch and Walter Pitts publish "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity", laying foundations for artificial neural networks. |
| 1943 | Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow coin the term "cybernetics". Wiener's popular book by that name published in 1948. |
| 1945 | Game theory which would prove invaluable in the progress of AI was introduced with the 1944 paper, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by mathematician John von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern. |
| 1945 | Vannevar Bush published As We May Think a prescient vision of the future in which computers assist humans in many activities. |
| 1948 | John von Neumann in response to a comment at a lecture that it was impossible for a machine to think: "You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you will tell me precisely what it is that a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that!". Von Neumann was presumably alluding to the Church-Turing thesis which states that any effective procedure can be simulated by a computer. |
| Date | Development |
| 1950 | Alan Turing proposes the Turing Test as a measure of machine intelligence. |
| 1950 | Claude Shannon published a detailed analysis of chess playing as search. |
| 1950 | Isaac Asimov published his Three Laws of Robotics. |
| 1951 | The first working AI programs were written in 1951 to run on the Ferranti Mark 1 machine of the University of Manchester: a checkers-playing program written by Christopher Strachey and a chess-playing program written by Dietrich Prinz. |
| 1952–1962 | Arthur Samuel wrote the first game-playing program, for checkers, to achieve sufficient skill to challenge a respectable amateur. His first checkers-playing program was written in 1952, and in 1955 he created a version that learned to play. |
| 1956 | The Dartmouth College summer AI conference is organized by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathan Rochester of IBM and Claude Shannon. McCarthy coins the term artificial intelligence for the conference. |
| 1956 | The first demonstration of the Logic Theorist written by Allen Newell, J.C. Shaw and Herbert A. Simon. This is often called the first AI program, though Samuel's checkers program also has a strong claim. |
| 1958 | John McCarthy invented the Lisp programming language. |
| 1958 | Herbert Gelernter and Nathan Rochester described a theorem prover in geometry that exploits a semantic model of the domain in the form of diagrams of "typical" cases. |
| 1958 | Teddington Conference on the Mechanization of Thought Processes was held in the UK and among the papers presented were John McCarthy's Programs with Common Sense, Oliver Selfridge's Pandemonium, and Marvin Minsky's Some Methods of Heuristic Programming and Artificial Intelligence. |
| 1959 | The General Problem Solver was created by Newell, Shaw and Simon while at CMU. |
| 1959 | John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky founded the MIT AI Lab. |
| Late 1950s, early 1960s | Margaret Masterman and colleagues at University of Cambridge design semantic nets for machine translation. |
| Date | Development |
| 1960s | Ray Solomonoff lays the foundations of a mathematical theory of AI, introducing universal Bayesian methods for inductive inference and prediction. |
| 1960 | Man-Computer Symbiosis by J.C.R. Licklider. |
| 1961 | James Slagle wrote the first symbolic integration program, SAINT, which solved calculus problems at the college freshman level. |
| 1961 | In Minds, Machines and Gödel, John Lucas denied the possibility of machine intelligence on logical or philosophical grounds. He referred to Kurt Gödel's result of 1931: sufficiently powerful formal systems are either inconsistent or allow for formulating true theorems unprovable by any theorem-proving AI deriving all provable theorems from the axioms. Since humans are able to "see" the truth of such theorems, machines were deemed inferior. |
| 1961 | Unimation's industrial robot Unimate worked on a General Motors automobile assembly line. |
| 1963 | Thomas Evans' program, ANALOGY, written as part of his PhD work at MIT, demonstrated that computers can solve the same analogy problems as are given on IQ tests. |
| 1963 | Edward Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman published Computers and Thought, the first collection of articles about artificial intelligence. |
| 1963 | Leonard Uhr and Charles Vossler published "A Pattern Recognition Program That Generates, Evaluates, and Adjusts Its Own Operators", which described one of the first machine learning programs that could adaptively acquire and modify features and thereby overcome the limitations of simple perceptrons of Rosenblatt. |
| 1964 | Danny Bobrow's dissertation at MIT, shows that computers can understand natural language well enough to solve algebra word problems correctly. |
| 1964 | Bertram Raphael's MIT dissertation on the SIR program demonstrates the power of a logical representation of knowledge for question-answering systems. |
| 1965 | Lotfi Zadeh at U.C. Berkeley publishes his first paper introducing fuzzy logic "Fuzzy Sets". |
| 1965 | J. Alan Robinson invented a mechanical proof procedure, the Resolution Method, which allowed programs to work efficiently with formal logic as a representation language. |
| 1965 | Joseph Weizenbaum built ELIZA, an interactive program that carries on a dialogue in English language on any topic. It was a popular toy at AI centers on the ARPANET when a version that "simulated" the dialogue of a psychotherapist was programmed. |
| 1965 | Edward Feigenbaum initiated Dendral, a ten-year effort to develop software to deduce the molecular structure of organic compounds using scientific instrument data. It was the first expert system. |
| 1966 | Ross Quillian demonstrated semantic nets. |
| 1966 | Machine Intelligence workshop at Edinburgh – the first of an influential annual series organized by Donald Michie and others. |
| 1966 | Negative report on machine translation kills much work in Natural language processing for many years. |
| 1966 | Dendral program demonstrated to interpret mass spectra on organic chemical compounds. First successful knowledge-based program for scientific reasoning. |
| 1968 | Joel Moses demonstrated the power of symbolic reasoning for integration problems in the Macsyma program. First successful knowledge-based program in mathematics. |
| 1968 | Richard Greenblatt at MIT built a knowledge-based chess-playing program, MacHack, that was good enough to achieve a class-C rating in tournament play. |
| 1968 | Wallace and Boulton's program, Snob, for unsupervised classification uses the Bayesian Minimum Message Length criterion, a mathematical realisation of Occam's razor. |
| 1969 | Stanford Research Institute : Shakey the Robot, demonstrated combining animal locomotion, perception and problem solving. |
| 1969 | Roger Schank defined conceptual dependency model for natural language understanding. Later developed for use in story understanding by Robert Wilensky and Wendy Lehnert, and for use in understanding memory by Janet Kolodner. |
| 1969 | Yorick Wilks developed the semantic coherence view of language called Preference Semantics, embodied in the first semantics-driven machine translation program, and the basis of many PhD dissertations since such as Bran Boguraev and David Carter at Cambridge. |
| 1969 | First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence held at Stanford. |
| 1969 | Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert publish Perceptrons, demonstrating previously unrecognized limits of this feed-forward two-layered structure, and This book is considered by some to mark the beginning of the AI winter of the 1970s, a failure of confidence and funding for AI. Nevertheless, significant progress in the field continued. |
| 1969 | McCarthy and Hayes started the discussion about the frame problem with their essay, "Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence". |
| Date | Development |
| Early 1970s | Jane Robinson and Don Walker established an influential Natural Language Processing group at SRI. |
| 1970 | Seppo Linnainmaa publishes the reverse mode of automatic differentiation. This method became later known as backpropagation, and is heavily used to train artificial neural networks. |
| 1970 | Jaime Carbonell developed SCHOLAR, an interactive program for computer assisted instruction based on semantic nets as the representation of knowledge. |
| 1970 | Bill Woods described Augmented Transition Networks as a representation for natural language understanding. |
| 1970 | Patrick Winston's PhD program, ARCH, at MIT learned concepts from examples in the world of children's blocks. |
| 1971 | Terry Winograd's PhD thesis demonstrated the ability of computers to understand English sentences in a restricted world of children's blocks, in a coupling of his language understanding program, SHRDLU, with a robot arm that carried out instructions typed in English. |
| 1971 | Work on the Boyer-Moore theorem prover started in Edinburgh. |
| 1972 | Prolog programming language developed by Alain Colmerauer. |
| 1972 | Earl Sacerdoti developed one of the first hierarchical planning programs, ABSTRIPS. |
| 1973 | The Assembly Robotics Group at University of Edinburgh builds Freddy Robot, capable of using visual perception to locate and assemble models. |
| 1973 | The Lighthill report gives a largely negative verdict on AI research in Great Britain and forms the basis for the decision by the British government to discontinue support for AI research in all but two universities. |
| 1974 | Ted Shortliffe's PhD dissertation on the MYCIN program demonstrated a very practical rule-based approach to medical diagnoses, even in the presence of uncertainty. While it borrowed from DENDRAL, its own contributions strongly influenced the future of expert system development, especially commercial systems. |
| 1975 | Earl Sacerdoti developed techniques of partial-order planning in his NOAH system, replacing the previous paradigm of search among state space descriptions. NOAH was applied at SRI International to interactively diagnose and repair electromechanical systems. |
| 1975 | Austin Tate developed the Nonlin hierarchical planning system able to search a space of partial plans characterised as alternative approaches to the underlying goal structure of the plan. |
| 1975 | Marvin Minsky published his widely read and influential article on Frames as a representation of knowledge, in which many ideas about schemas and semantic links are brought together. |
| 1975 | The Meta-Dendral learning program produced new results in chemistry the first scientific discoveries by a computer to be published in a refereed journal. |
| Mid-1970s | Barbara Grosz established limits to traditional AI approaches to discourse modeling. Subsequent work by Grosz, Bonnie Webber and Candace Sidner developed the notion of "centering", used in establishing focus of discourse and anaphoric references in Natural language processing. |
| Mid-1970s | David Marr and MIT colleagues describe the "primal sketch" and its role in visual perception. |
| 1976 | Douglas Lenat's AM program demonstrated the discovery model. |
| 1976 | Randall Davis demonstrated the power of meta-level reasoning in his PhD dissertation at Stanford. |
| 1978 | Tom Mitchell, at Stanford, invented the concept of Version spaces for describing the search space of a concept formation program. |
| 1978 | Herbert A. Simon wins the Nobel Prize in Economics for his theory of bounded rationality, one of the cornerstones of AI known as "satisficing". |
| 1978 | The MOLGEN program, written at Stanford by Mark Stefik and Peter Friedland, demonstrated that an object-oriented programming representation of knowledge can be used to plan gene-cloning experiments. |
| 1979 | Bill VanMelle's PhD dissertation at Stanford demonstrated the generality of MYCIN's representation of knowledge and style of reasoning in his EMYCIN program, the model for many commercial expert system "shells". |
| 1979 | Jack Myers and Harry Pople at University of Pittsburgh developed INTERNIST, a knowledge-based medical diagnosis program based on Dr. Myers' clinical knowledge. |
| 1979 | Cordell Green, David Barstow, Elaine Kant and others at Stanford demonstrated the CHI system for automatic programming. |
| 1979 | The Stanford Cart, built by Hans Moravec, becomes the first computer-controlled, autonomous vehicle when it successfully traverses a chair-filled room and circumnavigates the Stanford AI Lab. |
| 1979 | BKG, a backgammon program written by Hans Berliner at CMU, defeats the reigning world champion. |
| 1979 | Drew McDermott and Jon Doyle at MIT, and John McCarthy at Stanford begin publishing work on non-monotonic logics and formal aspects of truth maintenance. |
| Late 1970s | Stanford's SUMEX-AIM resource, headed by Ed Feigenbaum and Joshua Lederberg, demonstrates the power of the ARPAnet for scientific collaboration. |
| Date | Development |
| 1980s | Lisp machines developed and marketed. First expert system shells and commercial applications. |
| 1980 | First National Conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence held at Stanford. |
| 1981 | Danny Hillis designs the connection machine, which utilizes Parallel computing to bring new power to AI, and to computation in general. |
| 1982 | The Fifth Generation Computer Systems project, an initiative by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry, begun in 1982, to create a "fifth generation computer" which was supposed to perform much calculation utilizing massive parallelism. |
| 1983 | John Laird and Paul Rosenbloom, working with Allen Newell, complete CMU dissertations on Soar. |
| 1983 | James F. Allen invents the Interval Calculus, the first widely used formalization of temporal events. |
| Mid-1980s | Neural Networks become widely used with the Backpropagation algorithm, also known as the reverse mode of automatic differentiation published by Seppo Linnainmaa in 1970 and applied to neural networks by Paul Werbos. |
| 1985 | The autonomous drawing program, AARON, created by Harold Cohen, is demonstrated at the AAAI National Conference. |
| 1986 | The team of Ernst Dickmanns at Bundeswehr University of Munich builds the first robot cars, driving up to 55 mph on empty streets. |
| 1986 | Barbara Grosz and Candace Sidner create the first computation model of discourse, establishing the field of research. |
| 1987 | Marvin Minsky published The Society of Mind, a theoretical description of the mind as a collection of cooperating agents. He had been lecturing on the idea for years before the book came out. |
| 1987 | Around the same time, Rodney Brooks introduced the subsumption architecture and behavior-based robotics as a more minimalist modular model of natural intelligence; Nouvelle AI. |
| 1987 | Commercial launch of generation 2.0 of Alacrity by Alacritous Inc./Allstar Advice Inc. Toronto, the first commercial strategic and managerial advisory system. The system was based upon a forward-chaining, self-developed expert system with 3,000 rules about the evolution of markets and competitive strategies and co-authored by Alistair Davidson and Mary Chung, founders of the firm with the underlying engine developed by Paul Tarvydas. The Alacrity system also included a small financial expert system that interpreted financial statements and models. |
| 1989 | The development of metal–oxide–semiconductor very-large-scale integration, in the form of complementary MOS technology, enabled the development of practical artificial neural network technology in the 1980s. A landmark publication in the field was the 1989 book Analog VLSI Implementation of Neural Systems by Carver A. Mead and Mohammed Ismail. |
| 1989 | Dean Pomerleau at CMU creates ALVINN. |
| Date | Development |
| 1990s | Major advances in all areas of AI, with significant demonstrations in machine learning, intelligent tutoring, case-based reasoning, multi-agent planning, scheduling, uncertain reasoning, data mining, natural language understanding and translation, vision, virtual reality, games, and other topics. |
| Early 1990s | TD-Gammon, a backgammon program written by Gerry Tesauro, demonstrates that reinforcement is powerful enough to create a championship-level game-playing program by competing favorably with world-class players. |
| 1991 | DART scheduling application deployed in the first Gulf War paid back DARPA's investment of 30 years in AI research. |
| 1992 | Carol Stoker and NASA Ames robotics team explore marine life in Antarctica with an undersea robot Telepresence ROV operated from the ice near McMurdo Bay, Antarctica and remotely via satellite link from Moffett Field, California. |
| 1993 | Ian Horswill extended behavior-based robotics by creating Polly, the first robot to navigate using vision and operate at animal-like speeds. |
| 1993 | Rodney Brooks, Lynn Andrea Stein and Cynthia Breazeal started the widely publicized MIT Cog project with numerous collaborators, in an attempt to build a humanoid robot child in just five years. |
| 1993 | ISX corporation wins "DARPA contractor of the year" for the Dynamic Analysis and Replanning Tool which reportedly repaid the US government's entire investment in AI research since the 1950s. |
| 1994 | Lotfi Zadeh at U.C. Berkeley creates "soft computing" and builds a world network of research with a fusion of neural science and neural net systems, fuzzy set theory and fuzzy systems, evolutionary algorithms, genetic programming, and chaos theory and chaotic systems. |
| 1994 | With passengers on board, the twin robot cars VaMP and VITA-2 of Ernst Dickmanns and Daimler-Benz drive more than one thousand kilometers on a Paris three-lane highway in standard heavy traffic at speeds up to 130 km/h. They demonstrate autonomous driving in free lanes, convoy driving, and lane changes left and right with autonomous passing of other cars. |
| 1994 | English draughts world champion Tinsley resigned a match against computer program Chinook. Chinook defeated 2nd highest rated player, Lafferty. Chinook won the USA National Tournament by the widest margin ever. |
| 1994 | Cindy Mason at NASA organizes the First AAAI Workshop on AI and the Environment. |
| 1995 | Cindy Mason at NASA organizes the First International IJCAI Workshop on AI and the Environment. |
| 1995 | "No Hands Across America": A semi-autonomous car drove coast-to-coast across the United States with computer-controlled steering for of the. Throttle and brakes were controlled by a human driver. |
| 1995 | One of Ernst Dickmanns' robot cars drove more than 1000 miles from Munich to Copenhagen and back, in traffic, at up to 120 mph, occasionally executing maneuvers to pass other cars. Active vision was used to deal with rapidly changing street scenes. |
| 1997 | The Deep Blue chess machine defeats the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov. |
| 1997 | First official RoboCup football match featuring table-top matches with 40 teams of interacting robots and over 5000 spectators. |
| 1997 | Computer Othello program Logistello defeated the world champion Takeshi Murakami with a score of 6–0. |
| 1998 | Tiger Electronics' Furby is released, and becomes the first successful attempt at producing a type of A.I to reach a domestic environment. |
| 1998 | Tim Berners-Lee published his Semantic Web Road map paper. |
| 1998 | Ulises Cortés and Miquel Sànchez-Marrè organize the first Environment and AI Workshop in Europe ECAI, "Binding Environmental Sciences and Artificial Intelligence." |
| 1998 | Leslie P. Kaelbling, Michael Littman, and Anthony Cassandra introduce POMDPs and a scalable method for solving them to the AI community, jumpstarting widespread use in robotics and automated planning and scheduling |
| 1999 | Sony introduces an improved domestic robot similar to a Furby, the AIBO becomes one of the first artificially intelligent "pets" that is also autonomous. |
| Late 1990s | Web crawlers and other AI-based information extraction programs become essential in widespread use of the World Wide Web. |
| Late 1990s | Demonstration of an Intelligent room and Emotional Agents at MIT's AI Lab. |
| Late 1990s | Initiation of work on the Oxygen architecture, which connects mobile and stationary computers in an adaptive network. |
| Date | Development |
| 2000 | Interactive robopets become commercially available, realizing the vision of the 18th century novelty toy makers. |
| 2000 | Cynthia Breazeal at MIT publishes her dissertation on Sociable machines, describing Kismet, with a face that expresses emotions. |
| 2000 | The Nomad robot explores remote regions of Antarctica looking for meteorite samples. |
| 2002 | iRobot's Roomba autonomously vacuums the floor while navigating and avoiding obstacles. |
| 2004 | OWL Web Ontology Language W3C Recommendation. |
| 2004 | DARPA introduces the DARPA Grand Challenge requiring competitors to produce autonomous vehicles for prize money. |
| 2004 | NASA's robotic exploration rovers Spirit and Opportunity autonomously navigate the surface of Mars. |
| 2005 | Honda's ASIMO robot, an artificially intelligent humanoid robot, is able to walk as fast as a human, delivering trays to customers in restaurant settings. |
| 2005 | Recommendation technology based on tracking web activity or media usage brings AI to marketing. See TiVo Suggestions. |
| 2005 | Blue Brain is born, a project to simulate the brain at molecular detail. |
| 2006 | The Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Conference: The Next 50 Years AI@50 |
| 2007 | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B – Biology, one of the world's oldest scientific journals, puts out a special issue on using AI to understand biological intelligence, titled Models of Natural Action Selection |
| 2007 | Checkers is solved by a team of researchers at the University of Alberta. |
| 2007 | DARPA launches the Urban Challenge for autonomous cars to obey traffic rules and operate in an urban environment. |
| 2008 | Cynthia Mason at Stanford presents her idea on Artificial Compassionate Intelligence, in her paper on . |
| 2009 | Google builds autonomous car. |
