The history of artificial intelligence, embroidered in the manner of the Bayeux Tapestry: Lovelace's notes, Turing's question, a summer at Dartmouth that never ended, two winters, a chess match, a Go move, a comet called attention, the year everybody started talking to machines, Will Smith's spaghetti, glue on pizza, a king in a leather jacket, castles of data and the band that was nobody. Scroll sideways. Click a scene for what really happened.
The Bayeux Tapestry tells one story, the Norman conquest of England, as a single strip of linen about 70 metres long, scene after scene, with Latin captions stitched above the figures and a running border of beasts, fables and jokes. It is a work of propaganda as much as history: it was made by the winners, and it leaves things out. The history of AI suits it well. It is long, it is told mostly by the people who won, it is full of omens, feasts, boasts and fleets, and it is not finished.
Each scene here is a real event, with a short note on what happened and links to sources. The captions are in the dog Latin of the original ("HIC" means "here", as in here Harold sails to England). The borders carry the asides: the summer that was meant to be enough, the herald announcing that the perceptron will walk, the snow of the AI winters, a student asleep on the homework.
Nothing is traced or copied from the Bayeux Tapestry, which dates from the eleventh century. Every figure is drawn in code from a small kit of shapes in the manner of the original: oval heads, short tunics, coloured hose, stylised trees as dividers between scenes, and borders of paired beasts. The fills imitate laid-and-couched work, rows of parallel wool held down by small stitches, and every outline is a broken stem stitch with a slight wobble so no line is ruler-straight. The wool colours follow the small range of natural dyes in the original: madder reds, weld yellows, woad blues and the greens made by mixing them.
The whole cloth is drawn from one list of scenes, so adding the next chapter of the story means adding one entry. It will be extended as the history happens. The scene descriptions are written to be accurate and fair rather than complete: if you think something important is missing or told unfairly, the data and code are open and suggestions are welcome.
Every scene links its sources, mostly Wikipedia's articles and the primary papers and prize citations. The drawing code and scene list are MIT licensed and the text is CC BY 4.0. Data, code and a short paper: github.com/Tristan-Hotham/ai-tapestry and Zenodo.
Made with the help of one of the machines it depicts, which seemed only fair.