Rodney Brooks shares a trove of historic AI papers, from Turing to Minsky's RL thesis
SoloGen · x · 2026-09-08
Roboticist Rodney Brooks has assembled a collection of historic AI documents and films on his MIT page, featuring original versions of foundational works:
- Minsky's 1954 PhD thesis on neural-analog reinforcement systems — an early take on RL rarely seen in original form
- Turing's 1936 computability paper, 1950 "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," and the unpublished-until-1970 "Intelligent Machinery" (1948)
- The 1955 Dartmouth summer project proposal, possibly the first use of the term "artificial intelligence"
- Arthur Samuel's 1959 checkers paper (coining "Machine Learning") and Donald Michie's 1963 tic-tac-toe paper (coining "Reinforcement Learning")
- Plus von Neumann's 1945 EDVAC report, Grey Walter's tortoise papers, Fukushima's convolutional net, and the Kismet robot
A rare archive of primary sources for tracing where AI's core concepts came from.
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