5th century BC: Aristotle invents syllogistic logic, the first formal deductive reasoning system
16th century AD: Rabbi Loew supposedly invents the Golem, an artificial man made out of clay
17th century: Descartes proposes animals are machines and founds a scientific paradigm that will dominate for 250 years
17th century: Pascal creates the first mechanical calculator in 1642
18th century: Wolfgang von Kempelen "invents" fake chess-playing machine, The Turk
19th century: George Boole creates a binary algebra to represent "laws of thought"
19th century: Charles Babbage and Lady Lovelace develop sophisticated programmable mechanical computers, precursor to modern electronic computers
20th century: Karel Kapek writes "Rossum's Universal Robots", coining the English word "robot"
20th century: Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts lay partial groundwork for neural networks
20th century: Turing writes "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" – proposal of Turing test
1956: John McCarthy coins phrase "artificial intelligence"
1952-62: Arthur Samuel writes the first AI game program to challenge a world champion, in part due to learning
1950's-60's: Masterman et. al at Cambridge create semantic nets that do machine translation
1961: James Slagle writes first symbolic integrator, SAINT, to solve calculus problems
1963: Thomas Evan's writes ANALOGY, which solves analogy problems like the ones on IQ tests
1965: J. A. Robinson invents Resolution Method using formal logic as its representation language
1971: Terry Winograd demonstrates a program that can understand English commands in the word of blocks
1972: Alain Colmerauer writes Prolog
1974: Ted Shortliffe creates MYCIN, the first expert system which showed the effectiveness of rule-based knowledge representation for medical diagnosis
1978: Herb Simon wins Nobel Prize for theory of bounded rationality
1983: James Allen creates Interval Calculus as a formal representation for events in time
1980's: Backpropagation (invented 1974) rediscovered and sees wide use in neural networks
1985: ALVINN, "an autonomous land vehicle in a neural network" navigates across the country (2800 miles)
Early 1990's: Gerry Tesauro creates TD-Gammon, a learning backgammon agent that vies with championship players
1997: Deep Blue (a chess playing computer developed by IBM) defeats Garry Kasparov
Modern Times (post-Cartesian): Robopets, Widespread viruses, security holes aplenty, AI-powered CRM, Faster—and many more—computers