AI Timeline

1920 Karel Capek, a Czech novelist and playwright, coins the term “robot”

(from the Czech “robota,” for “serf labor”) in his play “R.U.R.”

1950 Alan Turing proposes what will become known as the Turing test, used to determine a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior

1955 John McCarthy creates the term “artificial intelligence”

1957 Frank Rosenblatt creates the perceptron, an algorithm for classifying images

1962 Arthur Samuel’s checkersplaying program beats checkers whiz Robert Nealey 1964 Joseph Weizenbaum creates a natural language processing program, ELIZA

1968 “2001: A Space Odyssey” is HAL released and a star named is born

1997 IBM’s Deep Blue computer beats chess champion Garry Kasparov

2011 IBM’s Watson computer wins Jeopardy, playing against two top champions

2013 MD Anderson Cancer Center and IBM announce plans to develop the IBM Watson-powered Oncology Expert Advisor

2014 Amazon introduces its virtual assistant Alexa, which WebMD and health systems now use to retrieve general health information, among other uses

2015 Alphabet’s AI division

DeepMind partners with the U.K.’s National Health Service to access health records, which the company will later be accused of mishandling 2016 Alphabet’s DeepMind defeats a Go champion

2017 MD Anderson Cancer Center puts its IBM Watson project on hold