Machine Learning Lineage

How this was checked

Each idea's year, people and institutions, and each line between ideas, carries a mark showing how it was checked.

• ● From a cited source. The fact appears in the idea's Wikipedia article, in the founding paper's arXiv record, or in a history of the field (Sutton & Barto, Turing Post, Wikipedia's timeline of machine learning, Schmidhuber's annotated history). The source is linked.
• ◐ Checked by a model. No source we read states it, but TypeSafe's Jev model judged it consistent with the established history. Jev was first tested on 118 true and deliberately wrong claims and sorted 95% of them correctly.
• ○ Editor's call. Neither a source nor the model confirmed it, and we kept it for the reason shown.
• Key people. The band under the lanes shows everyone credited on three or more ideas here, placed at their first, plus a few added by hand, each with the reason shown. Their X, LinkedIn and website links are only those recorded for them on Wikidata; without one, the name links to Wikipedia.
• ◇ Maker's claim. Ideas in the hatched cutting-edge zone at the right are too new for settled sources. Their facts are quoted word for word from the makers' own announcement, and they leave the zone once independent sources confirm them.

Definitions are quoted word for word, never rewritten. For each idea the clearest accurate definition was chosen from Scholarpedia (often written by the idea's own inventors), Google's Machine Learning Glossary, Wikipedia and the founding paper, with a local model checking that each one defines that exact idea. Where none did, the idea shows a one-line editor's summary, labelled as such.

Formulas are copied exactly from the idea's Wikipedia article, together with the article's own sentence naming the symbols. A local model picked the equation each idea is known for, checked against hand-labelled examples; ideas where no equation clearly qualified show none. The interactive demos run the formula's rule on small made-up examples.

Quoted text: Scholarpedia (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0), Google Machine Learning Glossary (CC BY 4.0), Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), and paper abstracts from arXiv, © their authors. Formulas typeset with KaTeX.