AI milestones in 1997
5 documented milestones from 1997.
Sojourner Rover Lands on Mars as First Autonomous Wheeled Vehicle on Another Planet
On 4 July 1997, NASA's Sojourner rover became the first wheeled vehicle to operate on another planet, driving onto the Martian surface as part of the Mars Pathfinder mission. Sojourner used onboard hazard-avoidance logic and laser stripe sensors to navigate autonomously when out of direct communication with Earth.
Deep Blue Defeats Garry Kasparov in Six-Game Rematch
In May 1997, IBM's Deep Blue chess-playing system defeated reigning world champion Garry Kasparov over a six-game match by a score of 3½–2½, becoming the first computer system to defeat a reigning world chess champion under standard tournament conditions.
Cleverbot Developed by Rollo Carpenter
Rollo Carpenter, a British AI developer, launched Cleverbot as a publicly accessible web application in 1997, extending his earlier Jabberwacky project. Cleverbot learned conversational responses directly from accumulated human inputs rather than from a hand-coded rule base, and went on to accumulate hundreds of millions of logged exchanges.
Long Short-Term Memory Introduced by Sepp Hochreiter and Jürgen Schmidhuber
In 1997, Sepp Hochreiter at Technische Universität München and Jürgen Schmidhuber at IDSIA published 'Long Short-Term Memory' in Neural Computation, introducing a recurrent neural network architecture with gated memory cells that could learn dependencies across long sequences without suffering from the vanishing gradient problem.
Nomad Robot Field Experiment, Atacama Desert
In June 1997, Carnegie Mellon University deployed the Nomad robot in the Atacama Desert, Chile, in a NASA-funded field experiment testing long-range autonomous and teleoperated rover navigation over approximately 220 kilometres of terrain, directly informing future planetary exploration rover design.