History of Artificial Intelligence

Professor Peter Jackson of the University of Edinburgh classified the artificial intelligence history into three periods namely

• The classical period (of game playing and theorem proving)
• The romantic period
• The modern period; the major research work carried out during these periods is presented below.

The classical period

This period dates back to 1950. The main research works carried out during this period include game playing and theorem proving. The concept of state-space approach for solving a problem, which is a useful tool for intelligent problem-solving even now, was originated during this period.
The period of classical artificial intelligence research began with the publication of Shannon’s paper on chess (1950) and ended with the publication by Feigenbaum and Feldman. The major area of research covered under this period is intelligent search problems involved in game-playing and theorem proving.
Turing’s “test”, which is a useful tool to test machine intelligence, originated during this period.

The Romantic Period

The romantic period started from the mid 1960s and continued until the mid 1970s. During this period, people were interested in making machines “understand”, by which they usually mean the understanding of natural languages. Winograd’s (1972) SHRDLU system, a program capable of understanding a non trivial subset of English by representing and reasoning about a restricted domain (a world consisting of toy blocks), in this regard needs special mention.
The knowledge representation scheme using special structures like “semantic nets” was originated by Quillian during this period. Minisky (1968) also made a great contribution from the point of view of information processing using semantic nets. Further, knowledge representation formalisms using frames, which were another contribution ofMinisky during this period, also need special mention.

The Modern Approach

The modern period starts from the latter half of the 1970s to the present day. This period is devoted to solving more complex problems of practical interest. The MYCIN experiments of Stanford University, resulted in an expert system that could diagnose and prescribe medicines for infectious bacteriological diseases.
The MECHO system for solving problems of Newtonian machines is another expert system that deals with real life problems. It should be added that besides solving real world problems, researchers are also engaged in theoretical research on artificial intelligence including heuristic search, uncertainty modeling and non-monotonic and spatio-temporal reasoning. To summarize, this period includes research on both theories and practical aspects of AI.
These three periods summarize roughly the history of AI, hence, we are able to understand AI history by periods and its evolution.