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Papers that changed AI, with a plain-language explainer for each.

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  1. 1990

    Elephants Don't Play Chess

    Rodney Brooks's 1990 paper argued for building artificial intelligence from the ground up, with ongoing physical interaction with the environment as the main constraint on design, rather than through the abstract manipulation of symbols that had dominated the field for roughly thirty years.

    Research historyRoboticsScience

  2. 1988

    Learning to predict by the methods of temporal differences

    Machine Learning

    Richard Sutton's 1988 paper introduced temporal-difference learning, a family of incremental prediction methods that assign credit from changes between successive predictions and are shown to be more economical and accurate than conventional supervised approaches on most prediction problems.

    Research historyReasoningScience

  3. 1961

    Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence

    Proceedings of the IRE 49(1)

    Marvin Minsky's 1961 survey in Proceedings of the IRE organized heuristic programming into five problem areas — search, pattern recognition, learning, planning and induction — and argued that machines would need to build models of their environments.

    Research historyReasoningSymbolic AI

  4. 1959

    Programs with Common Sense

    PSMTPNPL

    John McCarthy's 1959 paper proposing the advice taker, a program that would solve problems by manipulating sentences in formal languages and act when it deduced an imperative — an early statement of logical AI.

    Research historyReasoningSymbolic AI

  5. 1950

    Computing Machinery and Intelligence

    Mind

    In 1950 Alan Turing replaced the question "Can machines think?" with the imitation game, now called the Turing test, and answered the main objections to machine intelligence one by one.

    Research historyReasoningSymbolic AI

  6. 1936

    On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem

    Proc. London Math. Soc.

    Alan Turing's 1936 paper defined computable numbers through an abstract machine, now called the Turing machine, and showed that no general method can decide whether any given mathematical statement is provable.

    Research historyReasoningSymbolic AI