AI History: Intellectual roots of AI date back to the early studies of the nature of knowledge and reasoning. The dream of making a computer imitate humans also has a very early history. The concept of intelligent machines is found in Greek mythology. There is a story in the 8 th century A.D about Pygmalion Olio, the legendary king of Cyprus. Aristotle (384-322 BC) developed an informal system of syllogistic logic, which is the basis of the first formal deductive reasoning system.
 Early in the 17 th century, Descartes proposed that bodies of animals are nothing more than complex machines. Pascal in 1642 made the first mechanical digital calculating machine. 

In 1943: McCulloch and Pits propose modeling neurons using on/off devices. 
In 1950’s: Claude Shannon and Alan Turing try to write chess playing programs. 
In 57: John McCarthy thinks of the name ―Artificial Intelligence‖. 
In 1960’s: Logic Theorist, GPS (General Problem Solver), micro worlds, neural networks. 
In 1971: NP-Completeness theory casts doubt on general applicability of AI methods.
In 1970’s: Knowledge based system and Expert systems were developed.
In 1980’s: AI techniques in widespread use, neural networks rediscovered. 

 The early AI systems used general systems, little knowledge. AI researchers realized that specialized knowledge is required for rich tasks to focus reasoning.
 

The 1990's saw major advances in all areas of AI including the following:
 • Machine learning, data mining
 • Intelligent tutoring,
 • Case-based reasoning, 
 • Multi-agent planning, scheduling,
 • Uncertain reasoning, 
 • Natural language understanding and translation,
 • Vision, virtual reality, games, and other topics. 
 In 2000, the Nomad robot explores remote regions of Antarctica looking for meteorite samples.