My learning journey: Rise of AI – Cyber Tales – Medium

In spite of all the current hype, AI is not a new field of study, but it has its ground in the fifties. If we exclude the pure philosophical reasoning path that goes from the Ancient Greek to Hobbes, Leibniz, and Pascal, AI as we know it has been officially started in 1956 at Dartmouth College, where the most eminent experts gathered to brainstorm on intelligence simulation. It went then through two main'winter' periods, in which investments and interested drastically declined, and back in the nineties it looked like pursuing the creation of an artificial intelligence system was a public shame and a waste of energy. However, as in the movie "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button", the more time it passed the more AI became actual and relevant. Luckily enough, in 1993 this period ended with the MIT Cog project to build a humanoid robot, and with the Dynamic Analysis and Replanning Tool (DART) -- that paid back the US government of the entire funding since 1950 -- and when in 1997 DeepBlue defeated Kasparov at chess, it was clear that AI was back to the top.