Articles
All published articles on the history of AI.
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Deep Blue vs. Kasparov: the match that shook the world (1997)
IBM's chess computer defeated the world champion in six games, a media spectacle that proved machines could outplay humans, and sparked a debate that never quite ended.
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The second AI winter: how the boom turned to bust (1987–1993)
Expert systems collapsed, Lisp machines became obsolete, governments cut funding, and AI entered years of disillusionment that nearly killed the field.
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Expert systems: when AI became a business (1980s)
Rule-based expert systems promised to bottle human expertise into software, they fuelled a billion-dollar boom, then collapsed into the second AI winter.
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The first AI winter: when the hype froze (1974–1980)
The Lighthill Report, DARPA cuts, and the perceptron backlash drained funding from neural networks and overambitious AI, setting the stage for a decade of scepticism.
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ELIZA: the chatbot that was never meant to be one (1966)
Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA used simple pattern-matching to simulate therapy, and accidentally proved that humans project understanding onto machines.
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Rosenblatt's perceptron: the machine that learned (1958)
Frank Rosenblatt's perceptron was the first machine to learn from experience, celebrated by the press, attacked by critics, and vindicated decades later.
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The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence (1956)
A six-to-eight-week workshop that coined the term "artificial intelligence" and launched it as a recognised field of research.
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Computing Machinery and Intelligence: Turing's imitation game (1950)
Alan Turing's 1950 paper replaced 'Can machines think?' with a practical test, and shaped how we still talk about machine intelligence.