Exactly. Additionally, the AI label is changing its meaning over the time. My AI professors used to tell semi-jokingly that whenever we get computers to solve

Exactly. Additionally, the AI label is changing its meaning over the time. My AI professors used to tell semi-jokingly that whenever we get computers to solve some task we thought required intelligence (thus we produced AI), the "intelligence" part of the AI gets redefined to exclude this particular solved topic (e.g. chess). We humans need to feel we are special. Keeping this in mind, AI in the narrow sense is stagnating, AI in the broad sense is growing. You could see "AI field" as a kind of incubator: cool stuff that works gets splintered into own subfields (computer vision, robotics, machine learning, neural networks, fuzzy systems, evolutionary algorithms etc). ---- Also, Wikipedia seems to have quite nice overview of the history of AI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellige...