On This Day in AI History

A CHRONICLE OF MACHINE INTELLIGENCE

DARTMOUTH TO DEEP LEARNING · THE PROGRAMS, PAPERS & PEOPLE · 1956–PRESENT

Welcome to On This Day A daily chronicle of artificial intelligence — the papers, programs, and people that built the field, from the 1956 Dartmouth workshop to today. Start here. Read the welcome →
January 1
ELIZA
System
ELIZA
Series
MIT
Venue
MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Date
January 1, 1966
Lab
MIT
Nickname
ELIZA, the first chatbot, is published
Researchers
Joseph Weizenbaum

ELIZA, the first chatbot, is published

Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA simulated conversation by pattern-matching user input, with its 'DOCTOR' script mimicking a Rogerian psychotherapist. Users often attributed real understanding to it, a reaction now known as the ELIZA effect. Described in a landmark paper in Communications of the ACM in January 1966. (Only the month is firmly fixed; the day is a placeholder.)

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Also on January 1

Shakey

Shakey — Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Menlo Park, California

SRI International · 1972 · SRI International
Charles Rosen · Nils Nilsson · Bertram Raphael

Shakey, developed at SRI from roughly 1966 to 1972, was the first mobile robot able to perceive its surroundings, reason about them, and plan actions by integrating perception, planning, and execution. Its development produced the A* search algorithm and the Hough transform. (A multi-year project wi…

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