Products

CALO was SRI's cognitive assistant project, begun in 2003 as part of a five-year, 150 million dollar DARPA program, built to learn from observation rather than fixed programming. Its work on virtual personal assistants was later leveraged to create Siri.

Research historyEnterpriseAgents & tool use

Cyc is a hand-built knowledge base and ontology of common-sense knowledge, begun by Douglas Lenat in 1984 to give software the basic concepts and rules about how the world works.

Research historyProduct historyData & datasets

R1, known inside Digital Equipment Corporation as XCON, was a rule-based expert system written by John P. McDermott at Carnegie Mellon University in 1978 to configure VAX computer orders automatically.

Research historyEnterpriseProduct history

SHRDLU was an early natural-language program built by Terry Winograd at MIT in 1968–1970 that conversed in English about a small blocks world, executing commands, answering questions and learning names — a landmark demo whose success fed an optimism later systems could not sustain.

Research historyProduct historySymbolic AI

ELIZA is an early program for holding a natural-language conversation with a computer, built at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum in the mid-1960s. Its DOCTOR script imitated a psychotherapist, and the readiness of users to treat it as understanding became known as the ELIZA effect.

Research historyProduct historySafety & governance

DENDRAL was a Stanford artificial intelligence project begun in 1964 that identified unknown organic molecules from mass spectra using chemical knowledge. It is widely described as the first expert system and the ancestor of later systems such as MYCIN and PROSPECTOR.

Research historyProduct historyScience

A checkers program built by Arthur Samuel at IBM, begun in 1949 and published in 1959, that learned by memorising positions, playing itself and scoring board positions, and played at a respectable amateur level.

Research historyProduct historySymbolic AI

Lisp is a programming language invented by John McCarthy at MIT in 1958, whose programs are themselves lists. It became the favoured language of early artificial intelligence research and introduced automatic garbage collection.

Research historyProduct historyDeveloper tools

GPS was a program built at RAND to act as a universal problem-solving machine, and is credited as the first computer program to separate problem knowledge from a general solving strategy.

Research historyProduct historySymbolic AI

Logic Theorist, completed in 1956 by Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon and Cliff Shaw, was the first program deliberately built to perform automated reasoning; it proved dozens of theorems from Principia Mathematica and introduced heuristics, list processing and reasoning as search.

Research historyProduct historySymbolic AI

Chinook is a checkers-playing computer program built by Jonathan Schaeffer and colleagues [^1]. It became the first computer program to win a human world championship in any game, and its completed form cannot be beaten [^1].

Research historyProduct historyScience

MYCIN was an early expert system built at Stanford in the 1970s to identify bacteria causing severe infections and recommend antibiotic treatment, notable for separating its rule base from its inference engine and for explaining its own reasoning.

Research historyProduct historySymbolic AI