To 1900
| Date | Development |
|---|---|
| Antiquity | Greek myths of Hephaestus and Pygmalion incorporated the idea of intelligent robots (such as Talos) and artificial beings (such as Galatea and Pandora). |
| Antiquity | Yan Shi presented King Mu of Zhou with mechanical men. |
| Antiquity | Sacred mechanical statues built in Egypt and Greece were believed to be capable of wisdom and emotion. Hermes Trismegistus would write "they have sensus and spiritus ... by discovering the true nature of the gods, man has been able to reproduce it." Mosaic law prohibits the use of automatons in religion. |
| 384 BC–322 BC | Aristotle described the syllogism, a method of formal, mechanical thought. |
| 1st century | Heron of Alexandria created mechanical men and other automatons. |
| 260 | Porphyry of Tyros wrote Isagogê which categorized knowledge and logic. |
| ~800 | Geber develops the Arabic alchemical theory of Takwin, the artificial creation of life in the laboratory, up to and including human life. |
| 1206 | Al-Jazari created a programmable orchestra of mechanical human beings. |
| 1275 | Ramon Llull, Catalan theologian invents the Ars Magna, a tool for combining concepts mechanically, based on an Arabic astrological tool, the Zairja. The method would be developed further by Gottfried Leibniz in the 17th century. |
| ~1500 | Paracelsus claimed to have created an artificial man out of magnetism, sperm and alchemy. |
| ~1580 | Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague is said to have invented the Golem, a clay man brought to life. |
| Early 17th century | René Descartes proposed that bodies of animals are nothing more than complex machines (but that mental phenomena are of a different "substance"). |
| 1623 | Wilhelm Schickard drew a calculating clock on a letter to Kepler. This will be the first of five unsuccessful attempts at designing a direct entry calculating clock in the 17th century (including the designs of Tito Burattini, Samuel Morland and René Grillet)). |
| 1641 | Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan and presented a mechanical, combinatorial theory of cognition. He wrote "...for reason is nothing but reckoning". |
| 1642 | Blaise Pascal invented the mechanical calculator, the first digital calculating machine |
| 1672 | Gottfried Leibniz improved the earlier machines, making the Stepped Reckoner to do multiplication and division. He also invented the binary numeral system and envisioned a universal calculus of reasoning (alphabet of human thought) by which arguments could be decided mechanically. Leibniz worked on assigning a specific number to each and every object in the world, as a prelude to an algebraic solution to all possible problems. |
| 1727 | Jonathan Swift published Gulliver's Travels, which includes this description of the Engine, a machine on the island of Laputa: "a Project for improving speculative Knowledge by practical and mechanical Operations " by using this "Contrivance", "the most ignorant Person at a reasonable Charge, and with a little bodily Labour, may write Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks, and Theology, with the least Assistance from Genius or study." The machine is a parody of Ars Magna, one of the inspirations of Gottfried Leibniz' mechanism. |
| 1750 | Julien Offray de La Mettrie published L'Homme Machine, which argued that human thought is strictly mechanical. |
| 1769 | Wolfgang von Kempelen built and toured with his chess-playing automaton, The Turk. The Turk was later shown to be a hoax, involving a human chess player. |
| 1818 | Mary Shelley published the story of Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus, a fictional consideration of the ethics of creating sentient beings. |
| 1822–1859 | Charles Babbage & Ada Lovelace worked on programmable mechanical calculating machines. |
| 1837 | The mathematician Bernard Bolzano made the first modern attempt to formalize semantics. |
| 1854 | George Boole set out to "investigate the fundamental laws of those operations of the mind by which reasoning is performed, to give expression to them in the symbolic language of a calculus", inventing Boolean algebra. |
| 1863 | Samuel Butler suggested that Darwinian evolution also applies to machines, and speculates that they will one day become conscious and eventually supplant humanity. |
Read more about this topic: Timeline Of Artificial Intelligence