Terry Winograd - 1970 Experiment call SHRDLU - MIT Labs
Deep Understanding of Human Language
A world of coloured blocks.
World of AI went very quite for 20 years
Then 1990 - Winograd again came out with something that fundamentally changed the world....
1995 - Professor at Stanford University - taking a keen interest in using AI for Internet Searching.
In the form of AI interpreting queries, written in English and reponding intelligently.
Winograd was unimpressed with the current state of searching which was very hit and miss.
He suggested using the "link structure of the web" as a way of layering search results and producing more accurate searches.
He assembled a small team of Phd research students and converted one of the dorms into a lab, and they built a web site, that was used by Standford students, which rapidly became very popular.
By 1998 this was so popular they founded a company - which has had a profnound impact on the world - as signifcant as the Johanne Gutenburg - printing press in my mind.
"Not since Gutenburg... has any invention empowered individuals, and transformed access to information"
The names of the students were Larry Page and Sergey Brin and the company Google!