A Brief History of AI

Seventy-five years of artificial intelligence, built live with an agent

Summary

When did artificial intelligence begin: in 1950 with Alan Turing, in 1956 at a workshop in Dartmouth, or in 2022 with ChatGPT? Instead of answering from a slide, we collect what you already know on a pinboard and hand it to an AI agent. The agent researches every milestone, reads the sources, checks a previous group’s list for errors, and turns the result into an interactive timeline with a quiz.

The app that the agent built and published with the group of the winter semester 2026/27 is online: A Brief History of AI.

What the agent does along the way is the programme of this course:

  • How can a model read a photo of handwriting?
  • How does a language model write a plan, code and text?
  • Why does it use tools, and when are rules better than learning?
  • Can we trust facts an AI has checked?
  • What happens when an agent splits its work among sub-agents, or publishes on its own?

Explanation

The explanation of this concept is on its way. Until then, the slides tell the story.

Slides

Practice questions

The practice questions for this concept are on the course’s practice platform, in the same format as the exam and with the reasoning behind every answer.

Further reading