Historic Background
Around the time between 1840 and 1850 AD, there was research and concept of a computing machine/engine by a mathematician Charles Babbage. He discussed his research and mathematical concepts with Ada Lovelace, a mathmematics enthusiast. She wrote about how machines would perform mathematical computations similar to humans, using intelligence. She also emphasized that humans provide the input and the machines will provide solutions, similar to Artifical Intelligence (AI) of today.
 
The timeline below shows how the concept of thinking machines and machines with intelligence started the AI revolution. Autonomous machines, expert systems and robots were the first to embed intelligence using hardware, software and sensors. The timeline shows how AI has been evolving over the years.

1923:   Rossum's Universal Robots, a play created by Karel Capek was started in London. The term robot, derived from Czech word "robota" was first used, which meant "forced labor" or "serf".
1944: Concept of Neural Network, proposed by Warren McCullough and Walter Pitts (University of Chicago)
1950: Turing Test, Concept of thinking machines, Computing Machinery and Intelligence - Alan Turing.
1951: Creation of first AI program
1956: The Term Artificial Intelligence proposed by John McCarthy of MIT and Marvin Minsky of CMU popularized it
1957: Organization of a Perceptron - Frank Rosenblatt
1958: LISP programming language was developed by John McCarthy while working at MIT
1964: Daniel G. Bobrow created a rule-based AI program STUDENT, as a part of his PhD dessertation at MIT in LISP to solve algebraic word problems. This program and research is considered as a earliest implementation of NLP
1965: Eliza - The first chatbot that used NLP created by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT
1970: Freddy - The Robot, was created at the Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh.
1972: Shakey - The Mobile Robot, was created at Artificial Intelligence research center of SRI between 1966 and 1972
1980: Autonomous vehicle was tested by Mercedes-Benz
1985: Robot used brain surgery to place a needle in a precise location.
1997: Kismet - The Robot, created by Dr. Cynthia Breazeal, of MIT, that would recognize and simulate emotions
1997: IBM Deep Blue computer defeats world chess champion Gary Kasparov
2000: FDA approves robotic surgery for laparoscopic procedures using surgical robot
2003: Opportunity - Robotic Rover created for NASA Mars exploration (followed by Curiosity in 2011/2012)
2011: IBM Watson defeats Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings (who had a records of 74 consecutive wins) and Brad Rutter (Tournament of Champion winner)
2015: Baidu's Minwa supercomputer, using Convolutional Neural Network is able to recognize and categorize images - implementation of facial recognition
2016: DeepMind's AlphaGo program, that is based on Deep Neural Network defeats Lee Sodol, the world champion Go player in best of five games.
2017: Transformer concept published [20]
2020: GPT-3, released by OpenAI
2022: ChatGPT (chat GPT) is developed by OpenAI that uses LLM to analyze user input/prompts and provide best possible answer


  Evolution of AI and Related Technologies Over the Years [26]
  High Level LSTM Architecture
 
At every milestone shown above, AI was implemented by the use of thinking algorithms, machine learning, logical decision making, heuristics and related AI enabling technologies such as NLP, machine vision, pattern recognition, neural networks, feedback sensors and so on. Major advances in electronic hardware, memory was also in progress during these times.
 
There was also a time when the computer harware was in the early stages of development. The results of massive matrix and tensor computation was slow. This resulted in reduced research funding for AI. These times were know as AI Winters.


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Revised Date: January 16th, 2025