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History

Lighthill Report

A 1973 report by mathematician James Lighthill to the British Parliament concluding that AI research had failed to deliver on its promises. It led to massive funding cuts in the U.S. and UK, triggering the first AI winter.
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Related Terms

Expert System

A type of AI from the 1980s that encoded human specialist knowledge as a set of if-then rules. Expert systems like XCON were commercially successful for a time but ultimately proved too brittle and expensive to maintain, contributing to the second AI winter.

Perceptron

An early type of neural network. Minsky and Papert's 1969 book "Perceptrons" demonstrated mathematical limitations of single-layer networks, which effectively killed neural network research funding for over a decade.

AlexNet

A deep neural network that won the 2012 ImageNet competition by a landslide, beating the runner-up by over 10 percentage points. Built by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton, AlexNet proved that deep learning worked and is considered the inflection point for modern AI.

Deep Blue

An IBM chess computer that defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. A major public milestone for AI, though it was narrow AI built specifically for chess.

AlphaGo

A program by Google DeepMind that defeated world Go champion Lee Sedol in 2016. Go was considered far too complex for brute-force AI, making this a landmark achievement.

Logic Theorist

Often called the first AI program, created by Allen Newell and Herbert Simon and demonstrated at the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop. It could prove mathematical theorems.

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