From mechanical automation to intelligent systems
Regulation, repetition, and programming: the search for machines that act and decide with less human intervention.
Suggested order
Begin with steam and the factory, which bring mechanization and automatic regulation. The computer adds the possibility of changeable instructions. Robotics applies this to machines that move and handle objects, and computational intelligence examines systems that perform tasks associated with cognition, with their advances and limitations.
The Steam Engine and the Mechanization of Labor
From pumping water out of English mines to driving locomotives, the steam engine was the work of many hands and gave industry power independent of rivers and muscle.
7 min read · Energy
Factories and the Technical Systems of Industrialization
The factory brought machines, power and workers under one roof and one clock, from the spinning mills of Cromford to the assembly lines of the twentieth century.
6 min read · Production and industry
From Mechanical Calculators to the First Computers
From the 17th century to 1951, mechanical calculators, punched cards and wartime projects led to the first electronic computers and the stored program.
6 min read · Computing
Robotics: From Automatic Machines to Programmable Systems
Robotics combined centuries of automatons, control theory and digital electronics to produce industrial, mobile and exploration robots whose limits remain significant.
6 min read · Automation and computational intelligence
Historical Milestones of Computational Intelligence
Computational intelligence is a research field more than seventy years old, marked by cycles of enthusiasm and reassessment, rival methods and debates that remain open.
7 min read · Automation and computational intelligence