AI Timeline — The Complete History of Artificial Intelligence

The timeline presents a comprehensive history of artificial intelligence, starting with the visionaries who asked whether machines can think. In 1943, McCulloch and Pitts published a logical calculus of neural activity, establishing that networks of simple binary neurons could compute any function a Turing machine could, laying the theoretical foundation for all neural networks. Alan Turing's 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' introduced the Imitation Game (Turing Test) as a benchmark for machine intelligence. Arthur Samuel's 1952 checkers program at IBM coined the term 'machine learning' as it improved through experience. In 1955, Newell and Simon's Logic Theorist proved theorems from Principia Mathematica and is often called the first AI program. The 1956 Dartmouth Conference officially defined AI as a field, with founders like McCarthy, Minsky, Shannon, and Rochester. Frank Rosenblatt's Mark I Perceptron (1957) was the first hardware neural network, generating enormous media hype that promised machines would walk, talk, and be conscious. John McCarthy created LISP in 1958, a language with features now standard in AI. This timeline also notes the recurring pattern of overpromising followed by setbacks (AI winters), a cycle that continues into the modern agentic era.