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On 1 June 1999 Sony opened Internet-only orders for AIBO, its four-legged entertainment robot, at 250,000 yen in Japan and USD 2,500 in the United States; the limited run of 5,000 units sold out in 20 minutes.
On May 11, 1999, Sony announced AIBO, a four-legged entertainment robot (model ERS-110) it called the first robot designed for home entertainment, to be sold only over the Internet in limited quantities in Japan and the United States.
In 1999 IBM launched the Deep Computing Institute, building on its experience with Deep Blue to apply advanced computing to complex technological and business problems.
Sony's AIBO ERS-110 sold out within 20 minutes of reservations opening; when many people asked for one of their own, Sony hurriedly released the ERS-111 half a year later, and its history page groups both under the 1999 model year.
On July 4, 1997, NASA's Mars Pathfinder landed on Mars and deployed Sojourner, the first wheeled vehicle operated on another planet, beginning an uninterrupted period in which at least one spacecraft has operated at Mars.
The first official RoboCup games and conference, held in 1997 as planned with IJCAI-97 in Nagoya, drew more than 40 real and simulated teams and over 5,000 spectators, and marked the first step toward robotic soccer players that could beat a human World Cup champion team.
Mars Pathfinder launched on December 4, 1996, from Cape Canaveral on a Delta II rocket, carrying a lander and the small rover Sojourner. Between them the two vehicles flew four instruments, one of them a spectrometer mounted on the rover itself.
Held in Osaka in November 1996 alongside IROS-96, Pre-RoboCup-96 was the first robot soccer competition aimed at research and education, with eight simulation-league teams and a middle-size robot demonstration; official RoboCup games followed in 1997.
At IJCAI-95 in Montreal in August 1995, organizers announced the first Robot World Cup, to be held with IJCAI-97 in Nagoya, and set up Pre-RoboCup-96 plus the Soccer Server simulator.
In 1994 the University of Alberta's Chinook became the first computer program to win a human world championship in a board game, taking the World Man-Machine Checkers Championship in Boston.
On August 2, 1993, Apple shipped the Newton MessagePad, the first product built on its Newton technology and the company's first handheld computing device. Its troubled launch contributed to John Sculley's replacement as CEO by Michael Spindler.
In June 1993, Apple's Personal Interactive Electronics division signed an agreement with ParaGraph International to use ParaGraph's cursive handwriting recognition technology in the Newton family, with further development planned at ParaGraph's Sunnyvale facility.
In June 1993, researchers including Minoru Asada, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Hiroaki Kitano proposed a robot soccer competition tentatively called the Robot J-League. International interest soon led to its renaming as the Robot World Cup Initiative, or RoboCup.
In 1992, Alan Mackworth's paper on seeing robots and a Tokyo workshop on AI grand challenges independently put forward robot soccer as a way to drive AI and robotics research.
On 8 November 1991 the first Loebner Prize competition was held at The Computer Museum, where Joseph Weintraub's PC Therapist fooled five of ten judges and won a $1,500 award and a bronze medal.
In 1990, New York philanthropist Hugh Loebner offered $100,000 for the first machine to pass a restricted Turing Test, launching a public contest hosted by The Computer Museum.
In 1990, Chinook became the first program in any game to earn the right to play for a human world championship, beginning a path that led to a championship and, later, a solved checkers game.
The First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence was held in Washington, DC, from 7 to 9 May 1969, with proceedings covering theorem proving, robotics, natural language parsing and heuristic search; it began a conference series held every other year since.
A four-day symposium held at the National Physical Laboratory in November 1958, where Minsky, McCarthy, Selfridge, Rosenblatt, Backus and Hopper presented early work on machine intelligence; its two-volume proceedings appeared in 1959.
