Historical AI

A repository to collect papers and programs of historical interest to AI. Mostly gathered while reading Pamela McCorduck's Machines Who Think

Must Reads

• Newell (1965) - Limitations of the Current Stock of Ideas about Problem Solving
• Minsky (1961) - Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence
• McCarthy & Hayes (1969) - Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence

Beginnings

Turing - Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950)

Paper

Turing's seminal AI work... A nice read with a curious section about ESP!

Shannon - A Chess-Playing Machine (1950)

Paper

Claude Shannon's original 1950 paper...

An article in Scientific American. Super readable... Scientific American Article

McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester, Shannon (1955) - A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence

Paper

Newell, Simon & Shaw - The Logic Theory Machine (1956)

Paper

Proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in Russell & Whitehead's Principia Mathematica and even found a new and better proof for one.

Source Code has not been transcribed and doesn't appear to be easily available.

McCarthy (1959) - Programs with Common Sense (Advice Taker)

Paper

Early speculative paper on something McCarthy called the "Advice Taker". Possibly the first paper mentioning "Common Sense" in terms of AI. Also contains an interesting discussion with Bar-Hillel and Selfridge as an appendix.

Minsky's Classic Overview (1961)

Minsky (1961) - Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence

Paper

A sort of summary/review article covering the approaches and advances in AI at that time

GPS - General Problem Solver

1958 - Newell, Simon & Shaw - Chess-Playing Programs and the Problem of Complexity

Paper

1959 - Newell, Shaw, Simon - Report on a General Problem Solving Program

Paper

Very generic extension of their Logic Theory Machine, separating problem domain from the process of problem solving and introducing concepts like Means End Analysis, Planning, Goals, Sub-Goals and Differences.

A more readable paper with emphasis on the comparison between how GPS works versus human subjects...

1963 - GPS - A Program That Simulates Human Thought

Newell & Simon (1963) - GPS - A Program That Simulates Human Thought

Roughly Chronological Highlights

Green, Wolf, Chomsky, Laughery (1961) - BASEBALL - An Automatic Question-Answerer

Paper

This program could answer questions about baseball (for a specific year) specified in plain english using syntactic analysis...

Lindsay (1963) - Inferential Memory as the Basis of Machines Which Understand Natural Language (SAD SAM)

Paper

Hardly mentioned in the paper, which is more of an early analysis (an excellent one) of the difficulties of natural language processing, is SAD SAM which was the name of the program which could examine kinship relations.

Bobrow (1964) - Natural Language Input for a Computer Problem Solving System (STUDENT)

Paper

STUDENT was a LISP program that could accept mathematical puzzles in a limited set of English, and solve them.

Evans (1964) - A Heuristic Program to Solve Geometric-Analogy Problems (ANALOGY)

Paper

ANALOGY was a LISP program designed to solve simple Geometric Analogy problems like '''Figure A is to Figure B as Figure C is to...'''

Newell, Ernst (1965) - The Search for Generality

Paper

Newell (1965) - Limitations of the Current Stock of Ideas about Problem Solving

Paper

This is magnificent. Short, concise survey of the known methods of solving problems, and an incisive look at a problem we don't know how we could go about solving/proving, and how we as humans come across the solution from 'out of nowhere'... The example problem is the 'mutilated chess board' checker problem.

Weizenbaum - ELIZA (1966)

Paper

Live version can be found here: https://www.masswerk.at/elizabot/

• Javascript version: https://github.com/brandongmwong/elizabot-js
• Python version: https://github.com/wadetb/eliza

Much more detail on all kinds of ELIZAs here:

• http://elizagen.org/
• https://github.com/jeffshrager/elizagen

McCarthy & Hayes (1969) - Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence

Paper

Detailed and philosophical approach to the problems of AI, trying to develop a mathematical logic approach to it. Discussion of Modal logics of the time as possibly useful.

SHRDLU - Winograd (1971)

A couple of modern/ports are available on github:

• https://github.com/stuartpb/shrdlu
• https://github.com/tsgouros/www-shrdlu

Very early natural language understanding system written in Lisp by Terry Winograd. The system manipulates a simple block world by accepting commands in English. The original paper/thesis is available here:

http://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/shrdlu/AITR-235.pdf

Reddy (1974) - The HEARSAY Speech Understanding System

Paper

Early speech recognition within a domain (Chess Moves)

Shortliffe (1975) - A model of inexact reasoning in medicine (The MYCIN system)

Paper

Copycat - Hofstadter & Mitchell (Fluid Analogies Research Group (FARG))

A modern python port of the analogy making program Copycat can be found here:

https://github.com/fargonauts/copycat

Fun

Cadwallader-Cohen (1961) - The Chaostron - An Important Advance in Learning Machines

Paper