The early history of AI/cybernetics seems poorly documented. There are a few books, some articles and some oral histories about what was going on with McCulloch and Pitts. It makes one wonder what might have been with a lot of things. Including if Pitts had lived longer, been able to get out of the rut he found himself in the end (to put it mildly) and hadn’t burned his PhD dissertation, but perhaps one of the more interesting comments that is directly relevant to all this lies in this fragment from a “New Scientist” article[1]:> Worse, it seems other researchers deliberately stayed away. John McCarthy, who coined the term “artificial intelligence”, told Piccinini that when he and fellow AI founder Marvin Minsky got started, they chose to do their own thing rather than follow McCulloch because they didn’t want to be subsumed into his orbit.
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23831800-300-how-a-fr...
mindcrime|4 months ago
I guess it depends on what you mean by "documented". If you're talking about a historical retrospective, written after the fact by a documentarian / historian, then you're probably correct.
But in terms of primary sources, I'd say it's fairly well documented. A lot of the original documents related to the earlier days of AI are readily available[1]. And there are at least a few books from years ago that provide a sort of overview of the field at that moment in time. In aggregate, they provide at least a moderate coverage of the history of the field.
Consider also that the term "History of Artificial Inteligence" has its own Wikipedia page[2] which strikes me as reasonably comprehensive.
[1]: Here I refer to things like MIT CSAIL "AI Memo series"[3] and related[4][5], the Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on AI[6], the CMU AI Repository[7], etc.
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig...
[3]: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5460/browse?type=dateis...
[4]: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/39813
[5]: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5461
[6]: https://www.ijcai.org/all_proceedings
[7]: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/rep_info/intro.html