AI Milestones & Historical Pioneers
The history of artificial intelligence is marked by conceptual breakthroughs, algorithm developments, and high-profile benchmark victories over human masters. Alan Turing proposed the imitation game in his 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence', establishing the operational benchmark known as the Turing Test. In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer defeated reigning World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match, marking a milestone for symbolic heuristic search. In 2011, IBM Watson won Jeopardy! against champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. In 2016, DeepMind's AlphaGo defeated 18-time world Go champion Lee Sedol using deep reinforcement learning and Monte Carlo tree search, solving a game with $10^{170}$ possible board configurations.
Key Concepts & Examination Highlights
- Alan Turing introduced the imitation game (the Turing Test) in 1950 to evaluate whether a machine can exhibit indistinguishable human intelligence.
- IBM's Deep Blue defeated World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in May 1997 under standard tournament time controls.
- DeepMind's AlphaGo defeated legendary Go player Lee Sedol 4–1 in Seoul in March 2016 using deep neural networks and Monte Carlo Tree Search.