AI
Where Robot Comes From
The word robot comes from a 1920 Czech play, from robota, meaning forced labour.
More in AI
The test for machine thinking is 75 years old
In 1950 Alan Turing proposed the imitation game: if a person cannot tell a machine from a human in conversation, asking whether it thinks may be the wrong question.
The first neural network ran in 1958
Frank Rosenblatt's Perceptron was a physical machine with motor-driven weights that learned to classify simple shapes — decades before the deep learning boom.
AI learns by running its mistakes backwards
Backpropagation sends the error at the output back through the network, nudging millions of weights slightly in the direction that reduces it. Repeat billions of times.
One 2017 paper reshaped modern AI
"Attention Is All You Need" introduced the Transformer, letting models weigh every word against every other word at once. Almost every large model today descends from it.
Move 37 stunned the world of Go
In 2016 AlphaGo played a move human experts called a mistake. It won the game — and changed how professionals understood a 2,500-year-old game.
Modern AI is trained on graphics chips
GPUs were built to render game pixels in parallel — the same maths as multiplying huge matrices, which is exactly what training a neural network needs.