2006: Celebrating 75 years of AI - History and Outlook: the Next 25 Years

Abstract: When Kurt Goedel layed the foundations of theoretical computer science in 1931, he also introduced essential concepts of the theory of AI. Although much of subsequent AI research has focused on heuristics, which still play a major role in many practical AI applications, in the new millennium AI theory has finally become a full-fledged formal science, with important optimality results for embodied agents living in unknown environments, obtained through a combination of theory a la Goedel and probability theory. Here we look back at important milestones of AI history, mention essential recent results, and speculate about what we may expect from the next 25 years, emphasizing the significance of the ongoing dramatic hardware speedups, and discussing Goedel-inspired, self-referential, self-improving universal problem solvers.