The Evolutionary Timeline (1943 – 2025)
Academic theory above the datum line · applied projects below.
Academic Theory1943
McCulloch & Pitts
A Logical Calculus / artificial neurons
A Logical Calculus / artificial neurons
1951
Marvin Minsky: SNARC
Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator
Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator
1957
Frank Rosenblatt
The Perceptron
The Perceptron
2015+
Demis Hassabis / DeepMind
AlphaGo → AlphaGo Zero → AlphaFold
AlphaGo → AlphaGo Zero → AlphaFold
2017
Noam Shazeer / Google
Attention Is All You Need
Attention Is All You Need
2024–25
Applied Frameworks
LangChain, MCP, Agent2Agent Protocol
LangChain, MCP, Agent2Agent Protocol
Milestones
Academic papers and applied projects, in chronological order — the source data behind the timeline above.
| Work | Year | Developer(s) | Significance |
|---|---|---|---|
| A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity | 1943 | Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts — Univ. of Chicago | Proposed artificial neuron networks. |
| Machine Intelligence | 1948 | Alan Turing — National Physical Laboratory | Proposed training through a pain/pleasure mechanism. |
| SNARC | 1951 | Marvin Minsky (graduate student) — Princeton | Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator; one of the first attempts at building an AI machine. |
| The Perceptron | 1957 | Frank Rosenblatt — Cornell | A probabilistic model for information storage and organization. |
| Brain Function and Adaptive Systems: A Heterostatic Theory | 1972 | A. Harry Klopf — Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories | Reinforcement learning. |
| Learning Representations by Back-Propagating Errors | 1986 | Rumelhart, Hinton, Williams | Led to widespread adoption of backpropagation. |
| Attention Is All You Need | 2017 | Noam Shazeer (team lead) — Google | Transformers: multi-head attention, vectorized word embedding. |
| Name | Year | Category | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| AAAI | 1979 | Society | Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence — Newell, Feigenbaum, Minsky, McCarthy. |
| The Society of Mind | 1986 | Book | Marvin Minsky — agentics as applied to mind; feedforward; Mixture of Experts architecture. |
| Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction | 1998 | Book | Andrew Barto / Richard Sutton — UMass Amherst. |
| AlphaGo → Master → Zero | 2015–2017 | Game | Demis Hassabis, DeepMind — single-purpose → generalized → self-taught game solver. |
| AlphaFold | 2017 | Application | DeepMind — generalized solution to the protein-folding problem. |
| ONNX | 2017 | Repository | Open Neural Network Exchange — Linux Foundation. |
| Isomorphic Labs | 2021 | Lab | Demis Hassabis — advancing human health by building on and beyond the Nobel-winning AlphaFold system. |
| MCP — Model Context Protocol | 2024 | Protocol | Anthropic. |
| LangChain | 2024 | Framework | Harrison Chase — integration framework. |
| Google Brain lab | 2024 | Lab | Andrew Ng — Google AI lab. |
| Prompt Design and Engineering: Introduction and Advanced Methods | 2024 | Paper | Xavier Amatriain. |
| A2A — Agent2Agent Protocol | 2025 | Protocol | Google — inter-agent communications. |
| PegasusAI | — | Grant | NSF — scientific workflow management. |