History of AI

Alan Turing publishes Computing Machinery and Intelligence, proposing the Turing Test to measure machine intelligence.

Turing asked: "Can machines think?" His test judged AI by whether a human could tell it apart from another person in conversation — a idea that still shapes AI research today.

John McCarthy coins the term "Artificial Intelligence" at a summer workshop at Dartmouth College.

Researchers believed human-level AI could be achieved in a single summer. Though overly optimistic, this event officially launched AI as its own field of study.

Joseph Weizenbaum creates ELIZA, one of the first programs to simulate human conversation.

ELIZA mimicked a therapist by rephrasing user input as questions. Many users felt a real emotional connection — raising early questions about AI deception and trust.

Rule-based expert systems bring AI into business, medicine, and engineering.

Programs like MYCIN helped doctors diagnose infections. Companies invested heavily in AI, leading to the first commercial AI boom — before funding cuts caused an "AI winter."

IBM's Deep Blue beats world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match.

Deep Blue evaluated 200 million positions per second. The victory showed AI could outperform humans in complex strategic tasks and captured global public attention.

Watson defeats two Jeopardy! champions using natural language processing and vast knowledge databases.

Unlike chess programs, Watson had to understand wordplay and ambiguous clues. It demonstrated AI's growing ability to process human language at scale.

Google DeepMind's AlphaGo defeats Go world champion Lee Sedol — a breakthrough in deep reinforcement learning.

Go has more possible board positions than atoms in the universe. AlphaGo learned creative strategies humans had never seen, marking a leap in machine learning capability.

OpenAI releases ChatGPT, bringing generative AI to hundreds of millions of everyday users.

ChatGPT could write essays, code, and emails in seconds. It sparked worldwide debate about cheating in schools, job displacement, misinformation, and the ethics of AI-generated content.

Governments and organisations worldwide push for AI safety laws, transparency, and ethical guidelines.

The EU AI Act, school AI policies, and industry safety pledges reflect growing recognition that AI must be developed responsibly — balancing innovation with human rights and fairness.