1970s
| Date | Development |
|---|---|
| Early 1970s | Jane Robinson and Don Walker established an influential Natural Language Processing group at SRI. |
| 1970 | Jaime Carbonell (Sr.) developed SCHOLAR, an interactive program for computer assisted instruction based on semantic nets as the representation of knowledge. |
| 1970 | Bill Woods described Augmented Transition Networks (ATN's) as a representation for natural language understanding. |
| 1970 | Patrick Winston's PhD program, ARCH, at MIT learned concepts from examples in the world of children's blocks. |
| 1971 | Terry Winograd's PhD thesis (MIT) demonstrated the ability of computers to understand English sentences in a restricted world of children's blocks, in a coupling of his language understanding program, SHRDLU, with a robot arm that carried out instructions typed in English. |
| 1971 | Work on the Boyer-Moore theorem prover started in Edinburgh. |
| 1972 | Prolog programming language developed by Alain Colmerauer. |
| 1972 | Earl Sacerdoti developed one of the first hierarchical planning programs, ABSTRIPS. |
| 1973 | The Assembly Robotics Group at University of Edinburgh builds Freddy Robot, capable of using visual perception to locate and assemble models. (See Edinburgh Freddy Assembly Robot: a versatile computer-controlled assembly system.) |
| 1973 | The Lighthill report gives a largely negative verdict on AI research in Great Britain and forms the basis for the decision by the British government to discontinue support for AI research in all but two universities. |
| 1974 | Ted Shortliffe's PhD dissertation on the MYCIN program (Stanford) demonstrated a very practical rule-based approach to medical diagnoses, even in the presence of uncertainty. While it borrowed from DENDRAL, its own contributions strongly influenced the future of expert system development, especially commercial systems. |
| 1975 | Earl Sacerdoti developed techniques of partial-order planning in his NOAH system, replacing the previous paradigm of search among state space descriptions. NOAH was applied at SRI International to interactively diagnose and repair electromechanical systems. |
| 1975 | Austin Tate developed the Nonlin hierarchical planning system able to search a space of partial plans characterised as alternative approaches to the underlying goal structure of the plan. |
| 1975 | Marvin Minsky published his widely-read and influential article on Frames as a representation of knowledge, in which many ideas about schemas and semantic links are brought together. |
| 1975 | The Meta-Dendral learning program produced new results in chemistry (some rules of mass spectrometry) the first scientific discoveries by a computer to be published in a refereed journal. |
| Mid 1970s | Barbara Grosz (SRI) established limits to traditional AI approaches to discourse modeling. Subsequent work by Grosz, Bonnie Webber and Candace Sidner developed the notion of "centering", used in establishing focus of discourse and anaphoric references in Natural language processing. |
| Mid 1970s | David Marr and MIT colleagues describe the "primal sketch" and its role in visual perception. |
| 1976 | Douglas Lenat's AM program (Stanford PhD dissertation) demonstrated the discovery model (loosely-guided search for interesting conjectures). |
| 1976 | Randall Davis demonstrated the power of meta-level reasoning in his PhD dissertation at Stanford. |
| 1978 | Tom Mitchell, at Stanford, invented the concept of Version spaces for describing the search space of a concept formation program. |
| 1978 | Herbert A. Simon wins the Nobel Prize in Economics for his theory of bounded rationality, one of the cornerstones of AI known as "satisficing". |
| 1978 | The MOLGEN program, written at Stanford by Mark Stefik and Peter Friedland, demonstrated that an object-oriented programming representation of knowledge can be used to plan gene-cloning experiments. |
| 1979 | Bill VanMelle's PhD dissertation at Stanford demonstrated the generality of MYCIN's representation of knowledge and style of reasoning in his EMYCIN program, the model for many commercial expert system "shells". |
| 1979 | Jack Myers and Harry Pople at University of Pittsburgh developed INTERNIST, a knowledge-based medical diagnosis program based on Dr. Myers' clinical knowledge. |
| 1979 | Cordell Green, David Barstow, Elaine Kant and others at Stanford demonstrated the CHI system for automatic programming. |
| 1979 | The Stanford Cart, built by Hans Moravec, becomes the first computer-controlled, autonomous vehicle when it successfully traverses a chair-filled room and circumnavigates the Stanford AI Lab. |
| 1979 | BKG, a backgammon program written by Hans Berliner at CMU, defeats the reigning world champion. |
| 1979 | Drew McDermott and Jon Doyle at MIT, and John McCarthy at Stanford begin publishing work on non-monotonic logics and formal aspects of truth maintenance. |
| Late 1970s | Stanford's SUMEX-AIM resource, headed by Ed Feigenbaum and Joshua Lederberg, demonstrates the power of the ARPAnet for scientific collaboration. |
Read more about this topic: Timeline Of Artificial Intelligence