Category: AI in History

In the fall of 2012, a neural network called AlexNet entered the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge and cut the top-5 error rate nearly in half — from 26% to 15.3%. The runner-up, using conventional computer vision techniques, scored 26.2%. It wasn’t a close race. It was a discontinuity. That gap mattered not because…

In 1979, a program called BKG 9.8 defeated the reigning world backgammon champion, Luigi Villa, 7-1 in a match played in Monte Carlo. It was the first time a computer had beaten a human world champion at any board game. Most people have never heard of it. That near-total obscurity is itself instructive — because…

In 1992, a neural network called TD-Gammon sat down to play backgammon against the best human players on earth and, within a few years of self-play training, reached a level that genuinely surprised the grandmasters. Not because it played like them. Because it didn’t. It had discovered moves and opening strategies that centuries of human…

In May 1997, a computer called Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in a six-game match for the world chess championship. Kasparov was, by wide consensus, the greatest chess player who had ever lived. The result sent shockwaves through culture, philosophy, and cognitive science. But the most interesting thing about that moment isn’t what it meant…

In 1958, Frank Rosenblatt stood before cameras at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory and made a claim that would echo for decades: his Perceptron, a machine roughly the size of a wardrobe, could learn to recognize images the way a human brain does. The press ran with it. Headlines promised a machine that would soon walk,…