Artificial intelligence

Topics represented

Artificial intelligence (81) · Aprendizaje automático (28) · People (11) · Redes neuronales (6) · Nobel laureates (5) · Seguridad y control (5) · Gobernanza (4) · IA simbólica (3) · Instituciones y financiación (3) · Aprendizaje por refuerzo (2) · Physics (2) · Lenguaje (2)

Records and sources

Ordered by start date. Long lives and processes may begin before the period you want to study.

1. 1912–1954

   Alan Turing

   A British mathematician whose ideas about computation and cryptanalytic work were influential. This entry links him to computing history without crediting one person with the development of modern computing.

2. 1916–2001

   Herbert Simon

   Herbert Simon (1916–2001) appears in the official census of individual laureates for Economic Sciences (1978). This record represents the person’s life; each award is dated separately, and the prize year does not stand for the date of their whole body of work.

3. 1923–2008

   Joseph Weizenbaum

   ELIZA’s creator Joseph Weizenbaum examined how users attributed understanding to conversational programs. His criticism of delegating human decisions to computers connected chatbot history with social responsibility.

4. 1927–2011

   John McCarthy

   John McCarthy advanced the Dartmouth meeting and the Lisp language. His work helped institutionalize AI research and formulate programs based on symbolic representations and reasoning.

5. 1928–1971

   Frank Rosenblatt

   Frank Rosenblatt developed the perceptron and advocated studying learning through models inspired by neural networks. His career illustrates an early connectionist tradition, with technical limits and expectations that generated controversy.

6. 1933–… (as of 2026-09-01)

   John J. Hopfield

   John J. Hopfield (1933–present) appears in the official census of individual laureates for Physics (2024). This record represents the person’s life; each award is dated separately, and the prize year does not stand for the date of their whole body of work.

7. 1943

   McCulloch and Pitts’ formal neurons

   Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts described networks of simplified units capable of representing logical operations. They linked the study of the nervous system with computation, without yet providing a general learning method.

8. 1947–… (as of 2026-09-01)

   Geoffrey Hinton

   Geoffrey Hinton (1947–present) appears in the official census of individual laureates for Physics (2024). This record represents the person’s life; each award is dated separately, and the prize year does not stand for the date of their whole body of work.

9. 1948

   Wiener publishes Cybernetics

   Norbert Wiener systematized the study of control and communication in feedback systems. Cybernetics linked machines, organisms and information and provided an intellectual antecedent to AI, although the two traditions are not identical.

10. 1949

    Hebb proposes a neural learning mechanism

    Donald Hebb proposed that joint activity could strengthen connections between nerve cells. His book The Organization of Behavior offered a biological hypothesis that influenced associative-learning models.

11. 1950

    The Turing test

    Alan Turing asks “Can machines think?” and proposes a conversational criterion for discussing machine intelligence. The proposal centers debate on an observable interaction; it is not an agreed test of consciousness.

12. 1956

    Dartmouth summer research project

    The 1956 meeting brought researchers together around a program called artificial intelligence. The proposal by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon had already used that name in 1955; the meeting helped articulate the field.

13. 1956

    Logic Theorist and automated theorem proving

    Allen Newell, Herbert Simon and Cliff Shaw developed Logic Theorist to prove theorems through heuristic search. The 1956 report documented a symbolic approach to AI in which reasoning is represented as operations on symbols.

14. 1958

    Lisp: symbolic programs and data

    John McCarthy began Lisp, a language based on list processing. Its mechanisms for representing and manipulating expressions made it a lasting tool for AI research.

15. 1958

    Perceptron

    Frank Rosenblatt presents the perceptron, an early trainable neural-network model that influences later machine learning. The model learns weights from examples, but its limits do not represent those of all later networks.

16. 1959

    Samuel publishes machine learning with checkers

    Arthur Samuel described a checkers program that improved through experience and adjustments to its position evaluation. The work showed an alternative to manually specifying every decision and helped establish machine learning as a research program.

17. 1965

    DENDRAL and expert knowledge

    A Stanford team including Edward Feigenbaum, Joshua Lederberg and Carl Djerassi began DENDRAL to infer chemical structures. It demonstrated the value of combining search with specialist knowledge and opened an important path for expert systems.

18. 1966

    ALPAC questions machine translation

    The ALPAC committee critically assessed the usefulness, quality and cost of machine translation available in the United States. It recommended prioritizing linguistic research and translator aids, exposing the gap between technological promises and evaluated results.

19. 1966

    ELIZA

    Joseph Weizenbaum publishes ELIZA, one of the first famous conversational programs and an early chatbot reference. Its responses used rules and word substitution, allowing researchers to observe how readily users attributed understanding to the program.

20. 1966–1972

    Shakey: perception, planning and action

    SRI’s Shakey project integrated visual perception, planning and robot movement between 1966 and 1972. It demonstrated executing high-level instructions in a constrained environment, an antecedent of agents that chain actions.

21. 1969

    Perceptrons and the limits of a class of networks

    Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert published a mathematical analysis of perceptrons’ capabilities and limitations for specific tasks. The book influenced debate about neural networks; its results did not establish the impossibility of all architectures or alone explain subsequent funding cuts.

22. 1972

    Prolog and logic programming

    Alain Colmerauer and Philippe Roussel developed Prolog in Marseille, drawing on work in deduction and language. It allowed relations and rules to be expressed for an interpreter to search for solutions, consolidating another tradition of symbolic AI.

23. 1973

    The Lighthill report and limits of British AI

    The report commissioned by the Science Research Council criticized AI’s promises and its difficulties scaling from small problems to complex situations. It became a reference point in British funding debates; the so-called AI winters had different timelines and effects across countries and fields.

24. 1976–… (as of 2026-09-01)

    Demis Hassabis

    Demis Hassabis (1976–present) appears in the official census of individual laureates for Chemistry (2024). This record represents the person’s life; each award is dated separately, and the prize year does not stand for the date of their whole body of work.

25. 1980

    XCON brings expert systems into industry

    R1, later called XCON, began configuring Digital Equipment Corporation equipment orders. Its application demonstrated the commercial value of specialist rules and the need to maintain large knowledge bases.

26. 1982–1992

    Japan pursues fifth-generation computers

    Japan’s fifth-generation project investigated knowledge processing and parallel logical inference through 1992. It represented a long-term public AI strategy; its results and limits cannot be reduced to a commercial product race.

27. 1982

    Hopfield networks and associative memory

    John Hopfield presented recurrent networks whose dynamics could retrieve stored patterns. The model connected statistical-physics ideas with neural computation and provided a framework for studying distributed memories.

28. 1985–… (as of 2026-09-01)

    John Jumper

    John Jumper (1985–present) appears in the official census of individual laureates for Chemistry (2024). This record represents the person’s life; each award is dated separately, and the prize year does not stand for the date of their whole body of work.

29. 1986

    Modern backpropagation

    Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams popularize training multilayer networks through backpropagation. The paper broadened use of a method with earlier roots, rather than inventing every form of reverse differentiation.

30. c. 1987–c. 1993

    The expert-systems commercial downturn

    From the late 1980s, commercial expectations for expert systems declined and some public AI programs contracted. This process, associated with the second AI winter, coexisted with active research; its temporal and geographic boundaries are approximate.