The Birth of AI
1956–1969 · 9 milestones
AI was officially born as a field, and early programs showed surprising promise — leading to ambitious predictions about machine intelligence.
Milestones
The Dartmouth Conference
A two-month workshop at Dartmouth College where the term 'Artificial Intelligence' was officially coined. The proposal stated: '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.' This gathering brought together the founders of the field.
The Perceptron
Frank Rosenblatt built the Mark I Perceptron, the first hardware implementation of an artificial neural network. It could learn to classify simple visual patterns. The New York Times reported it as an 'Electronic Brain' that the Navy expected would 'be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence.'
LISP Programming Language
John McCarthy created LISP (LISt Processing), a programming language designed specifically for AI research. Its features — recursion, dynamic typing, garbage collection, and homoiconicity — were decades ahead of their time.
Unimate: First Industrial Robot
The first Unimate robot was installed on a General Motors assembly line in New Jersey, performing die-casting and spot-welding tasks. It was the first industrial robot to replace humans on a production line.
ELIZA: The First Chatbot
Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA, a program that simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist using simple pattern matching. Despite being purely rule-based with no understanding, users became emotionally attached to it and insisted it truly understood them — a phenomenon Weizenbaum found deeply disturbing.
SHRDLU: Natural Language Understanding
Terry Winograd created SHRDLU, a program that could understand and respond to English commands about a simulated 'blocks world.' Users could ask it to move objects, answer questions about their arrangement, and even understand pronouns and context within its limited domain.
2001: A Space Odyssey — HAL 9000
Stanley Kubrick's film introduced HAL 9000, an AI that could speak naturally, read lips, play chess, and ultimately turn against its human crew. HAL became the defining pop-culture image of artificial intelligence for generations.
Shakey the Robot
Shakey was the first mobile robot that could reason about its actions. It combined computer vision, natural language processing, and planning to navigate rooms, push objects, and solve simple tasks. It used the A* search algorithm and STRIPS planner.
DENDRAL: The First Expert System
DENDRAL automated chemical structure determination from mass spectrometry data. It used heuristic rules from domain experts to solve problems that normally required PhD-level expertise. Its successor Meta-DENDRAL could even generate new rules automatically.