The story of AI • past to future
The history of AI, explained in clear language: long-form articles, glossary, timeline, people profiles, Geek of the Week, and cited sources.
Geek of the Week
ELIZA DOCTOR: talk to the mirror
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Chat with a 1966-style rule bot that plays therapist — keyword lists, pattern templates, and pronoun swaps, no neural net. Flip “Show matched rule” and watch the ELIZA effect meet visible mechanics.
Latest articles
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DARPA Grand Challenge 2005: Stanley crosses the desert (2005)
On 8 October 2005 Stanford's autonomous vehicle Stanley won the DARPA Grand Challenge, completing a 212 km Mojave Desert course in 6 hours 53 minutes after no vehicle finished the 2004 race.
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LeCun's zip code nets: when convolution met backpropagation (1989)
In 1989 Yann LeCun and colleagues at AT&T Bell Laboratories published a convolutional neural network trained with backpropagation on handwritten US Postal Service zip codes, an early proof that local filters could scale to real mail sorting.
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Neural language models: Bengio's fight against the curse of dimensionality (2003)
In 2003 Yoshua Bengio and colleagues published A Neural Probabilistic Language Model in the Journal of Machine Learning Research, learning distributed word representations to escape the limits of huge n-gram tables.
Latest people
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Paul Smolensky
Cognitive scientist who described the harmonium model, a precursor to restricted Boltzmann machines. (b. 1955)
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Ruslan Salakhutdinov
Computer scientist who co-authored the 2006 Science paper on deep autoencoders with Geoffrey Hinton.
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Alan Turing
British mathematician whose 1950 paper on the imitation game shaped how we ask whether machines can think. (1912–1954)
