{
  "metadata": {
    "title": "AI Historical Eras",
    "description": "Major periods, movements, and technological eras in the history of artificial intelligence",
    "version": "1.0.0"
  },
  "eras": [
    {
      "id": "mechanical-age",
      "name": "Age of Automata",
      "startYear": -400,
      "endYear": 1820,
      "color": "#1a3a5c",
      "icon": "/images/ai-timeline/eras/mechanical-owl.png",
      "description": "From Greek myths to Enlightenment clockwork, humans imagined and built mechanical beings that mimicked life."
    },
    {
      "id": "mathematical-foundations",
      "name": "Mathematical Foundations",
      "startYear": 1820,
      "endYear": 1940,
      "color": "#1a4a6c",
      "icon": "/images/ai-timeline/eras/abacus.png",
      "description": "Boolean logic, mechanical computation, and formal reasoning laid the groundwork for programmable machines."
    },
    {
      "id": "dawn-of-computing",
      "name": "Dawn of Computing",
      "startYear": 1940,
      "endYear": 1956,
      "color": "#0d4f7a",
      "icon": "/images/ai-timeline/eras/alan-turing.png",
      "description": "Electronic computers emerged from wartime urgency, and visionaries began asking whether machines could think."
    },
    {
      "id": "golden-age",
      "name": "Golden Age of AI",
      "startYear": 1956,
      "endYear": 1974,
      "color": "#0a6a9a",
      "icon": "/images/ai-timeline/eras/chess-tournament.png",
      "description": "Unbounded optimism followed the Dartmouth Workshop. Early successes in game playing, theorem proving, and language fueled predictions that human-level AI was imminent."
    },
    {
      "id": "first-ai-winter",
      "name": "First AI Winter",
      "startYear": 1974,
      "endYear": 1980,
      "color": "#2a2a4a",
      "icon": "/images/ai-timeline/eras/snowflake.png",
      "description": "The Lighthill Report (1973) and unfulfilled promises led to severe funding cuts. Early AI relied on hand-coded rules and logic — an approach that couldn't handle the messy complexity of the real world."
    },
    {
      "id": "expert-systems-boom",
      "name": "Expert Systems Boom",
      "startYear": 1980,
      "endYear": 1987,
      "color": "#0d5a8a",
      "icon": "/images/ai-timeline/eras/hypothesis.png",
      "description": "Programs that encoded human expertise as if/then rules — expert systems — generated billions in commercial value. Japan's Fifth Generation project and DARPA's Strategic Computing Initiative poured funds into AI."
    },
    {
      "id": "second-ai-winter",
      "name": "Second AI Winter",
      "startYear": 1987,
      "endYear": 1993,
      "color": "#252545",
      "icon": "/images/ai-timeline/eras/icicle.png",
      "description": "Expert systems proved brittle and expensive to maintain. The specialized AI hardware market collapsed. 'Artificial intelligence' became commercially toxic — researchers rebranded their work as 'machine learning' or 'data mining.'"
    },
    {
      "id": "statistical-turn",
      "name": "Statistical & Probabilistic AI",
      "startYear": 1993,
      "endYear": 2012,
      "color": "#0a5580",
      "icon": "/images/ai-timeline/eras/logarithmic-function-properties.png",
      "description": "AI pivoted from hand-coded rules to learning patterns from data using statistical methods. Search engines and recommendation systems became its most visible applications, quietly powering Google, Netflix, and Amazon."
    },
    {
      "id": "deep-learning-revolution",
      "name": "Deep Learning Revolution",
      "startYear": 2012,
      "endYear": 2020,
      "color": "#0080b0",
      "icon": "/images/ai-timeline/eras/neural-network.png",
      "description": "Neural networks powered by graphics processors (GPUs) transformed image recognition, language understanding, and game playing. AlphaGo's defeat of the world Go champion signaled a new era of machine capability."
    },
    {
      "id": "foundation-models",
      "name": "Foundation Models & Generative AI",
      "startYear": 2020,
      "endYear": 2026,
      "color": "#00a0d0",
      "icon": "/images/ai-timeline/eras/large-language-model.png",
      "description": "Massive AI models trained on internet-scale data (GPT-3/4, DALL-E, Claude, Gemini) displayed surprising new abilities. AI entered mainstream culture, the global economy, and geopolitics."
    },
    {
      "id": "age-of-agents",
      "name": "Age of AI Agents",
      "startYear": 2026,
      "endYear": 2040,
      "color": "#00b8e0",
      "icon": "/images/ai-timeline/eras/anymal-autonomous-robot.png",
      "description": "Projected era of autonomous AI agents operating in the real world: coding, researching, managing systems, and making decisions with increasing independence.",
      "projected": true
    },
    {
      "id": "transformative-ai",
      "name": "Transformative AI",
      "startYear": 2040,
      "endYear": 2100,
      "color": "#00d0f0",
      "icon": "/images/ai-timeline/eras/ai-sparkle.png",
      "description": "Projected era when AI capabilities may fundamentally reshape civilization, economy, governance, and the human condition.",
      "projected": true
    }
  ],
  "aiWinters": [
    {
      "id": "winter-1",
      "name": "First AI Winter",
      "startYear": 1974,
      "endYear": 1980,
      "description": "Triggered by the Lighthill Report (UK, 1973) and DARPA funding cuts. Minsky & Papert (1969) had exposed the limitations of early neural networks (perceptrons). Translation and reasoning projects failed to deliver on their bold promises."
    },
    {
      "id": "winter-2",
      "name": "Second AI Winter",
      "startYear": 1987,
      "endYear": 1993,
      "description": "Expert systems proved brittle and expensive to maintain. The market for specialized AI hardware collapsed. Japan's Fifth Generation computer project failed to meet goals. 'AI' became a dirty word in business."
    }
  ],
  "computingEras": [
    {
      "id": "vacuum-tubes",
      "name": "Vacuum Tubes",
      "startYear": 1940,
      "endYear": 1956,
      "color": "#3a1a1a"
    },
    {
      "id": "transistors",
      "name": "Transistors",
      "startYear": 1956,
      "endYear": 1964,
      "color": "#3a2a1a"
    },
    {
      "id": "integrated-circuits",
      "name": "Integrated Circuits",
      "startYear": 1964,
      "endYear": 1971,
      "color": "#2a3a1a"
    },
    {
      "id": "microprocessors",
      "name": "Microprocessors",
      "startYear": 1971,
      "endYear": 2000,
      "color": "#1a3a2a"
    },
    {
      "id": "multicore-gpu",
      "name": "Multi-core & GPU",
      "startYear": 2000,
      "endYear": 2020,
      "color": "#1a2a3a"
    },
    {
      "id": "ai-accelerators",
      "name": "AI Accelerators & Custom Silicon",
      "startYear": 2020,
      "endYear": 2100,
      "color": "#0a2a4a"
    }
  ]
}