Plate IV. Candles in the Archive, 1987–2006
Candles in the Archive
The boom collapses; a few lamps stay lit.
The LISP machine market collapsed in 1987 and “AI” became a word to avoid in grant proposals. Researchers rebranded as statistics, pattern recognition and machine learning.
In the dark, durable ideas matured: convolutional networks read handwritten zip codes, LSTMs learned to remember, support vector machines and Bayesian networks became standard tools, and Deep Blue beat the world chess champion in 1997.
Events
- A neural network reads zip codes (1989)
- Deep Blue defeats Kasparov (11 May 1997)
- Long short-term memory (Nov 1997)