# Timeline of Artificial Intelligence

A compact chronological index of major AI milestones. For narrative depth, see [History](history.md).

## 1950s
- **1950** — Alan Turing publishes *Computing Machinery and Intelligence*; introduces the Turing test.
- **1956** — Dartmouth Workshop coins the term "artificial intelligence."
- **1956** — *Logic Theorist* (Newell & Simon) proves theorems via search.
- **1958** — McCarthy creates Lisp; Rosenblatt develops the Perceptron.

## 1960s–1970s
- **1966** — ELIZA (Weizenbaum) simulates conversation; Shakey robot begins autonomous planning.
- **1969** — *Perceptrons* (Minsky & Papert) analyzes perceptron limits.
- **1975** — MYCIN expert system for medical diagnosis.

## 1980s
- **1986** — Rumelhart, Hinton & Williams publish backpropagation for multilayer networks.
- **1987** — LISP machine market crash contributes to an AI winter.

## 1990s–2000s
- **1997** — Deep Blue defeats Kasparov at chess.
- **2006** — Hinton et al. demonstrate deep belief networks.
- **2011** — IBM Watson beats humans on *Jeopardy!*.

## 2010s
- **2012** — AlexNet wins ImageNet, igniting the deep-learning era.
- **2015** — TensorFlow released.
- **2016** — AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol; PyTorch released.
- **2017** — Transformer paper ("Attention Is All You Need").

## 2020s
- **2020** — GPT-3 demonstrates few-shot capabilities at scale.
- **2022** — ChatGPT launches, catalyzing public adoption of LLMs.
- **2023** — Bletchley Summit on frontier AI safety.
- **2024** — EU AI Act adopted; multimodal and agentic systems advance rapidly.

## Recurring Themes
- Cycles of **hype and winter**.
- Shifts between **symbolic** and **statistical** paradigms.
- Growth driven by **compute, data, and scale**.

*See [History](history.md) for full discussion, or [Glossary](glossary.md) for terms.*