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THE BIRTH OF AI (1952-1956)

With the advancement of computers and programming languages, computer scientists
began to play an important role in the development of AI. High-level computer
languages, such as FORTRAN, LISP, and COBOL, are invented.
The key achievements during this period are:
• 1952: Checkers was the first program to demonstrate that computers can learn
and not just perform what they are programmed to do.
• 1955: Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw, and Herbert A. Simon created
the ‘first artificial intelligence program’, named Logic Theorist.
This program successfully proved 38 of 52 basic Mathematics
theorems.

• 1956: The American computer scientist John McCarthy coined
the term Artificial Intelligence at the Dartmouth Conference.
He also developed LISP, a language for AI on computers. John McCarthy

THE EARLY YEARS (1956-1970)
This period is considered the golden period for development of AI.

Some milestones of this period are:
• 1961: Machine Educable Nougats And Crosses Engine (MENACE) was one of the
first programs capable of learning to play a perfect game of Tic-Tac-Toe.
• 1966: Joseph Weizenbaum created the first chatbot, which was named ELIZA.
It was a natural language processing system that imitated a doctor. It used pre-

recorded responses based on keywords in the responses of the users to give
advice on common anxiety-related problems.

ELIZA chatbot Joseph Weizenbaum
• 1969: Shakey, the first general-purpose mobile robot capable
of reasoning its actions is developed. Shakey did not need to
be instructed on each individual step of a complex process. It

was the first physical robot controlled by artificial intelligence.
SHRDLU, a natural language computer program that allowed
the user to carry on a conversation with the computer, name
collections, and query the state of a simplified ‘blocks world’
is developed. Shakey

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