| Date | Development |
|---|---|
| 1960s | Ray Solomonoff lays the foundations of a mathematical theory of AI, introducing universal Bayesian methods for inductive inference and prediction. |
| 1960 | Man-Computer Symbiosis by J.C.R. Licklider. |
| 1961 | James Slagle (PhD dissertation, MIT) wrote (in Lisp) the first symbolic integration program, SAINT, which solved calculus problems at the college freshman level. |
| 1961 | In Minds, Machines and Gödel, John Lucas denied the possibility of machine intelligence on logical or philosophical grounds. He referred to Kurt Gödel's result of 1931: sufficiently powerful formal systems are either inconsistent or allow for formulating true theorems unprovable by any theorem-proving AI deriving all provable theorems from the axioms. Since humans are able to "see" the truth of such theorems, machines were deemed inferior. |
| 1962 | First industrial robot company, Unimation, founded. |
| 1963 | Thomas Evans' program, ANALOGY, written as part of his PhD work at MIT, demonstrated that computers can solve the same analogy problems as are given on IQ tests. |
| 1963 | Edward Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman published Computers and Thought, the first collection of articles about artificial intelligence. |
| 1963 | Leonard Uhr and Charles Vossler published "A Pattern Recognition Program That Generates, Evaluates, and Adjusts Its Own Operators", which described one of the first machine learning programs that could adaptively acquire and modify features and thereby overcome the limitations of simple perceptrons of Rosenblatt |
| 1964 | Danny Bobrow's dissertation at MIT (technical report #1 from MIT's AI group, Project MAC), shows that computers can understand natural language well enough to solve algebra word problems correctly. |
| 1964 | Bertram Raphael's MIT dissertation on the SIR program demonstrates the power of a logical representation of knowledge for question-answering systems. |
| 1965 | J. Alan Robinson invented a mechanical proof procedure, the Resolution Method, which allowed programs to work efficiently with formal logic as a representation language. |
| 1965 | Joseph Weizenbaum (MIT) built ELIZA, an interactive program that carries on a dialogue in English language on any topic. It was a popular toy at AI centers on the ARPANET when a version that "simulated" the dialogue of a psychotherapist was programmed. |
| 1965 | Edward Feigenbaum initiated Dendral, a ten-year effort to develop software to deduce the molecular structure of organic compounds using scientific instrument data. It was the first expert system. |
| 1966 | Ross Quillian (PhD dissertation, Carnegie Inst. of Technology, now CMU) demonstrated semantic nets. |
| 1966 | Machine Intelligence workshop at Edinburgh – the first of an influential annual series organized by Donald Michie and others. |
| 1966 | Negative report on machine translation kills much work in Natural language processing (NLP) for many years. |
| 1967 | Dendral program (Edward Feigenbaum, Joshua Lederberg, Bruce Buchanan, Georgia Sutherland at Stanford University) demonstrated to interpret mass spectra on organic chemical compounds. First successful knowledge-based program for scientific reasoning. |
| 1968 | Joel Moses (PhD work at MIT) demonstrated the power of symbolic reasoning for integration problems in the Macsyma program. First successful knowledge-based program in mathematics. |
| 1968 | Richard Greenblatt (programmer) at MIT built a knowledge-based chess-playing program, MacHack, that was good enough to achieve a class-C rating in tournament play. |
| 1968 | Wallace and Boulton's program, Snob (Comp.J. 11(2) 1968), for unsupervised classification (clustering) uses the Bayesian Minimum Message Length criterion, a mathematical realisation of Occam's razor. |
| 1969 | Stanford Research Institute (SRI): Shakey the Robot, demonstrated combining animal locomotion, perception and problem solving. |
| 1969 | Roger Schank (Stanford) defined conceptual dependency model for natural language understanding. Later developed (in PhD dissertations at Yale University) for use in story understanding by Robert Wilensky and Wendy Lehnert, and for use in understanding memory by Janet Kolodner. |
| 1969 | Yorick Wilks (Stanford) developed the semantic coherence view of language called Preference Semantics, embodied in the first semantics-driven machine translation program, and the basis of many PhD dissertations since such as Bran Boguraev and David Carter at Cambridge. |
| 1969 | First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) held at Stanford. |
| 1969 | Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert publish Perceptrons, demonstrating previously unrecognized limits of this feed-forward two-layered structure. This book is considered by some to mark the beginning of the AI winter of the 1970s, a failure of confidence and funding for AI. Nevertheless significant progress in the field continued (see below). |
| 1969 | McCarthy and Hayes started the discussion about the frame problem with their essay, "Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence". |
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