Turing's “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”
The question posed: can machines think?
- Idea The imitation game — the “Turing test”
- Author Alan Turing
- Legacy A concrete test for machine intelligence
Interactive
Explore the story of AI
Seven decades of artificial intelligence you can move through, drag, and open — not just read. Everything below runs in your browser, with no sign-in and nothing to install.
The timeline, 1950 → today
Scroll down to move through the years. The spine fills as you go.
Dartmouth Conference
Artificial intelligence is named as a field
- Organizer John McCarthy
- With Minsky, Rochester, Shannon
- Claim Intelligence can be precisely described
- Legacy AI becomes a discipline
DENDRAL — an early expert system
Encoding a specialist’s rules in software
- Where Stanford
- Idea Rules capture expert chemistry knowledge
- Legacy The 1980s expert-systems boom
The first AI winter
Funding retreats as promises go unmet
- Cause Symbolic systems were brittle, did not scale
- Pattern Hype, then retreat — it recurs
Backpropagation popularized
A practical way to train multi-layer networks
- Figures Rumelhart, Hinton, Williams
- Idea Learn features by propagating error
- Legacy Foundation of modern deep learning
Deep Blue beats Kasparov
A machine defeats the world chess champion
- Builder IBM
- Method Massive search plus evaluation
- Legacy Focused machines can beat human experts
AlexNet
Deep learning breaks image recognition
- Figures Krizhevsky, Sutskever, Hinton
- Fuel GPUs + the ImageNet dataset
- Legacy The deep-learning revolution
“Attention Is All You Need”
The transformer architecture arrives
- Lab Google
- Idea Attention replaces recurrence
- Legacy The architecture behind modern LLMs
Generative AI goes mainstream
Large language models reach the public
- Shift Chat interfaces for general use
- Reach Hundreds of millions of users
- Legacy AI becomes everyday software
The present
Where the record stands today
- State Capable at tasks — not thinking
- Debate Genuine benefits, genuine risks
- Open Does understanding ever follow?
Scroll down to move through the years
The AI museum
A horizontal walk — one hall per landmark. Drag or swipe sideways.
1943
The McCulloch–Pitts neuron
The first mathematical model of how a neuron might compute — logic from biology.
1950
Turing’s imitation game
Turing reframes “can machines think?” as a test anyone can run.
1956
The Dartmouth conference
Artificial intelligence is named and organized as a field of research.
1980
The expert-systems era
Rule-based AI reaches industry, encoding specialists as if–then rules.
2012
AlexNet
Deep learning breaks image recognition, powered by GPUs and ImageNet.
2022
Generative AI goes public
Large language models move from the lab into everyday conversation.
Scroll sideways to walk through the halls →
The knowledge graph
Click a branch to expand its sub-topics and follow it into the archive.
Hover a branch to highlight it · click a branch head (+) to expand
From AI to the Transformer
Drag the nodes to rearrange the lineage; click one to read what it is.
Obsidian-style graph
Drag the nodes
Rearrange the lineage, then click any node to read what it is and when it arrived.
The people behind it
Click a name to see how the founders of the field connect.
Click a node to see how it connects.
The family tree of methods
Expand each branch — symbolic AI, machine learning, deep learning.
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- ▶ Logic
- ▶ Planning
- ▶ Expert Systems
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- ▶ Regression
- ▶ Decision Trees
- ▶ SVM
- ▶ Neural Networks
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- ▶ CNN
- ▶ RNN
- ▶ LSTM
- ▶ Transformer
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Click a branch to expand or collapse it