History

Main articles: History of artificial intelligence and Timeline of artificial intelligence
The field of artificial intelligence dawned in the 1950s. Since then, there have been many achievements in the history of artificial intelligence; some of the more notable moments include:
Year
Development
1950
Alan Turing introduces the Turing test, intended to test a machine's capability to participate in human-like conversation.
1951
The first working AI programs were written to run on the Ferranti Mark I machine of the University of Manchester: a checkers-playing program written by Christopher Strachey and a chess-playing program written by Dietrich Prinz.
1956
John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" as the topic of the Dartmouth Conference.
1958
John McCarthy invented the Lisp programming language.
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
Machine Intelligence workshop at Edinburgh - the first of an influential annual series organized by Donald Michie and others.
1972
The Prolog programming language was developed by Alain Colmerauer.
1973
Edinburgh Freddy Assembly Robot: a versatile computer-controlled assembly system.
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.
1991
AI logistics systems deployed in the first Gulf War save the US more money than spent on all AI research since 1950[citation needed].
1994
With passengers onboard, the twin robot cars VaMP and VITA-2 of Ernst Dickmanns and Daimler-Benz drive more than one thousand kilometers on a Paris three-lane highway in standard heavy traffic at speeds up to 130 km/h. They demonstrate autonomous driving in free lanes, convoy driving, and lane changes left and right with autonomous passing of other cars.
1997
The Deep Blue chess machine (IBM) beats the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov.
1998
Tiger Electronics' Furby is released, and becomes the first successful attempt at producing a type of A.I to reach a domestic environment.
1999
Sony introduces AIBO, it becomes one of the first improved A.I "pets" that is also autonomous.
2004
DARPA introduces the DARPA Grand Challenge requiring competitors to produce autonomous vehicles for prize money.
2005
Honda's ASIMO robot, an artificially intelligent humanoid robot, is able to walk as fast as a human, delivering trays to customers in restaurant settings.
During the 1970s and 1980s AI development experienced an AI winter due to failure to achieve expectations and lack of governmental funding.
During the 1990s and 2000s AI has become very influenced by probability theory and statistics. Bayesian networks are the focus of this new movement, providing links to more rigorous topics in statistics and engineering such as Markov models and Kalman filters, and bridging the divide between "neat" and "scruffy" approaches. This new school of AI is sometimes called machine learning. The last few years have also seen a big interest in game theory applied to AI decision making. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, there was much renewed interest and funding for threat-detection AI systems, including machine vision research and data-mining.