About
About this chronology
thehistoryof.ai is a reference chronology of artificial intelligence. It lists 38 milestones between 1936 and 2025, and each entry points to the publication, report or archival copy in which the work was first set out.
Inclusion rule
An entry is included when it is a primary publication, such as a journal article, conference paper, technical report, book or archived proposal, or a reproducible milestone whose method and result are documented in such a publication. Speculative forecasts, announcements without a technical report, and rankings of products are not included. Entries are chosen for their consequence to later research, so the list is selective and not exhaustive.
How entries are written
Each entry gives the year, title, authors, institution at the time of the work, venue and a link to the source. The two-sentence explanation states what the work established and what limitation followed it. Statements about results are kept to what the cited source reports.
Dates
The year is the year of the event or of first release. Where the cited source carries a different date, the entry says so. The Dartmouth proposal is dated 31 August 1955 for a project held in 1956, the Deep Blue match took place in 1997 and its technical description appeared in 2002, and Turing’s paper on computable numbers was read in 1936 and printed in the 1936–37 volume of its journal.
Sources
Links resolve to a DOI, an arXiv record, a publisher page or a named archive copy. DOI and arXiv records are checked against their registries for matching titles before each release.
Threads
Each entry belongs to one thread.
- Theory
- Formal results, definitions, programmes and assessments that frame the field.
- Learning
- Algorithms by which a system improves from data, experience or feedback.
- Architecture
- Structures of models and networks, and the units they are built from.
- Systems and Benchmarks
- Complete programs, datasets and public demonstrations against which progress was measured.
Eras
- 1936–1955
- Foundations and Formalisms
- 1956–1973
- Symbolic Reasoning and Early Learning
- 1980–2011
- Knowledge, Search and Statistical Representation
- 2012–2021
- Deep Learning, Scale and Structure
- 2022–2025
- Reasoning, Multimodal and Formal Systems
Reading without scripts
The chronology is plain HTML and every entry is shown without scripts. Filtering by era, thread and text is an addition that needs scripts.