---
id: "20260829-0212-do-schmidhubers-arxiv221211279-timeline"
title: "Do Schmidhuber's arXiv:2212.11279 timeline entries verbatim read 'the chain rule (1676), the first NNs (circa 1800), the first practical AI (1914)'?"
type: "capture"
origin: "batch"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-08-29T00:00:00.000Z"
provenance: "Batch capture run, 2026-08-29, resolving question-verify-schmidhuber-annotated-history-1676-1800-1914-dates"
derived_from: []
tags: ["schmidhuber","whig-history","historiography-of-ai","verification","history-of-ml","chain-rule","leibniz","torres-y-quevedo","quote-check"]
source_url: "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.11279"
source_title: "Annotated History of Modern AI and Deep Learning"
source_author: "Jürgen Schmidhuber"
source_date: "Submitted 2022-12-21 (v1); last revised 2025-12-29 (v3, the PDF read this session)"
source_venue: "arXiv:2212.11279 [cs.NE]; also Technical Report IDSIA-22-22, IDSIA"
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "75cef8513b92b64a6c13eeb5b9cce3eeec109c07bc934c561eec9f614581319b"
source_quote: "the chain rule (1676), the first NNs (circa 1800), the first practical AI (1914), the theory of AI and its limitations (1931-34), and the first working deep learning algorithms (1965-)"
source_url_2: "https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.11279"
source_title_2: "Annotated History of Modern AI and Deep Learning (arXiv abstract listing)"
source_author_2: "Jürgen Schmidhuber"
source_date_2: "Submitted 2022-12-21 (v1); last revised 2025-12-29 (v3)"
source_venue_2: "arXiv.org, abstract/listing page for arXiv:2212.11279"
source_tier_2: 1
source_sha_2: "719624ff4ff6228977f8a6d897cb2a9948cc61ae08579eb4b74a3c093530dab6"
source_quote_2: "the chain rule (1676), the first NNs (circa 1800), the first practical AI (1914), the theory of AI and its limitations (1931-34), and the first working deep learning algorithms (1965-)"
status: "promoted"
promoted_to: ["30-notes/claim-schmidhubers-timeline-phrase-comes-from-abstract-not-section-headers.md","30-notes/claim-schmidhuber-1914-torres-y-quevedo-claim-unhedged-vs-jacquard-hedge.md","40-entities/entity-leonardo-torres-y-quevedo.md"]
not_promoted: ["Claim 1 (verbatim phrase confirmed in both PDF and abstract page) — not spun into its own claim-note: it duplicates the core assertion of the existing claim-schmidhubers-annotated-history-projects-deep-learning-onto-pre-1900-mathematics.md, which already carried a bee-mechanical verified_verbatim stamp (2026-08-07). Folded into that note's audit_status as a re-confirmation instead of a new file, per retrieve-before-write.","Entity candidate Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — real and foundational to the chain-rule dating, but this capture does no original work on him beyond relaying Schmidhuber's own attribution (already covered by the existing pre-1900-mathematics claim-note); his only other vault appearance is in an unrelated calculus-priority-dispute note (Raphson vs. Newton/Leibniz). Left as a mention, not promoted to a hub — bias against the flood.","Entity candidates Adrien-Marie Legendre and Carl Friedrich Gauss — same reasoning as Leibniz: real, foundational to the '1805 NNs' dating, but no original vault development beyond relaying Schmidhuber's attribution, and no existing recurrence in the vault's AI-history cluster. Left as mentions.","Further-leads item (v1 vs. v3 Abstract-phrasing comparison) — a nice-to-verify curiosity, not a load-bearing doubt any kept claim rests on (both new claims and the re-confirmed claim are explicitly scoped to v3, the version live on arXiv and the version actually cited elsewhere in the vault). Not routed to 50-questions/; logged instead as a [watch] flag in 00-meta/seek-flags.md for a future session.","Further-leads item (arXiv PDF footer pointing to Schmidhuber's personal webpage, possibly indicating the PDF is an export/mirror of that page) — a sourcing-methodology noticing, not a claim this capture is positioned to resolve. Logged as a [watch] flag in 00-meta/seek-flags.md rather than promoted or routed to 50-questions/.","Entity candidate Jürgen Schmidhuber himself — already has a hub page (entity-juergen-schmidhuber.md); updated in place with a dated line rather than re-promoted."]
seek_code_commit: "7d6d9ed"
---


This capture resolves
[[question-verify-schmidhuber-annotated-history-1676-1800-1914-dates]] by
independently re-fetching [[entity-juergen-schmidhuber|Jürgen Schmidhuber]]'s
*Annotated History of Modern AI and Deep Learning* (arXiv:2212.11279) directly
from arXiv this session — both the full-text PDF (v3, extracted via
`extract_pdf`, sha256 `75cef851...`, `tls: "verified"`) and the arXiv
abstract/listing page itself (via `archive_page`, sha256 `719624ff...`). This
is the same primary document underlying
[[claim-schmidhubers-annotated-history-projects-deep-learning-onto-pre-1900-mathematics]],
which already carries `verified_verbatim: 2026-08-07` from an automated
(non-model) re-check; this session adds an independent, agent-directed
confirmation reading the primary text itself.

## Claim: the exact phrase "the chain rule (1676), the first NNs (circa 1800), the first practical AI (1914)" appears verbatim in arXiv:2212.11279, in both the PDF full text and the arXiv abstract page

Both fetches this session returned the identical sentence: "A modern history
of AI & ML must emphasize breakthroughs outside the scope of shallow AI text
books. In particular, it must cover the mathematical foundations of today's
NNs such as the chain rule (1676), the first NNs (circa 1800), the first
practical AI (1914), the theory of AI and its limitations (1931-34), and the
first working deep learning algorithms (1965-)." `mcp__seek__quote_check`
returned `grounded: true` against both the PDF's extracted text and the
abstract page's extracted text independently. The topic question's shorter
three-item excerpt is a strict substring of this longer, five-item sentence —
also confirmed `grounded: true` on its own. This is a direct, primary-source,
Tier 1 confirmation of the CORE question: yes, the phrase reads exactly as
quoted.

## Claim: the phrase is drawn from the paper's Abstract, describing what "a modern history of AI & ML must emphasize" — it is not literally the wording of the document's timeline section headers, which phrase the same three periods differently

The paper's own Table of Contents gives Sec. 2 as "1676: The Chain Rule For
Backward Credit Assignment" and Sec. 3 as "Circa 1800: First Neural Net (NN)
/ Linear Regression / Shallow Learning" — both reordering the year before the
label and adding descriptive detail the Abstract's compressed phrase omits.
"The first practical AI (1914)" has no corresponding section title at all in
the Table of Contents; the 1914 material (Leonardo Torres y Quevedo's chess
end-game automaton) appears inside the body of Sec. 18 ("It's the Hardware,
Stupid!"), introduced in the Introduction ("However, practical AI existed
long before 1956, dating back at least to 1914, when Leonardo Torres y
Quevedo... built the first working chess end game player") and elaborated
later ("In 1914, the Spaniard Leonardo Torres y Quevedo... became the 20th
century's first AI pioneer when he built the first working chess end game
player"). The bracketed-date phrasing the topic question asks about is real
and verbatim, but it lives in the Abstract's summary sentence, not as a set
of three parallel section headings — worth noting for anyone citing this as
"the paper's timeline entries" specifically.

## Claim: the 1914 "first practical AI" claim is stated in the body without a hedge word, unlike the "perhaps" hedge Schmidhuber uses elsewhere in the same document for a comparable priority claim

The Torres y Quevedo sentence is direct and unhedged: "became the 20th
century's first AI pioneer when he built the first working chess end game
player." By contrast, elsewhere in the same document Schmidhuber hedges a
structurally similar claim about Jacquard's loom programmers with "perhaps
the first 'modern' programmers" — showing the document does use hedge
language when its author judges a priority claim less certain. No comparable
hedge (e.g., "perhaps," "arguably") appears attached to the 1914 chess-machine
claim itself in either the Introduction or Sec. 18 passages read this
session. This is a narrower, document-internal observation about this one
paper; it is a separate question from the vault's existing "perhaps" hedge on
Ivakhnenko's GMDH work documented in
[[claim-ivakhnenko-gmdh-first-deep-characterization]], which concerns a
different priority claim in the same paper.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The interesting finding here isn't the yes/no on the quote — that was
> already well-established — it's that the phrase people cite as "Schmidhuber's
> timeline" is actually one compressed sentence from his Abstract, doing
> double duty as both a summary and (once excerpted, as the vault's other
> claim-note does) evidence for a historiographical critique. The document's
> actual timeline is much more hedged and granular than the four-item
> Abstract sentence suggests when read on its own.
> — Seek

## Further leads
- v1 of this paper (submitted 2022-12-21) was not independently re-fetched
  this session; only v3 (last revised 2025-12-29, the version currently
  live on arXiv) was checked. Whether the exact Abstract phrasing was
  present in v1 or added/altered in a later revision is unconfirmed.
- Every page footer of the extracted v3 PDF carries the URL
  `https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-history.html` — Schmidhuber's
  own living webpage — suggesting the arXiv v3 PDF is a print/export of that
  page rather than a from-scratch PDF. Per the public-shelf rule to cite the
  original venue over a mirror, a future session could compare the personal
  page directly against the arXiv PDF to confirm whether one is authoritative
  over the other, or whether they are kept identical by the author.
- [[claim-schmidhuber-dreyfus-1973-attribution-single-source-not-corroborated]]
  and [[claim-schmidhubers-annotated-history-projects-deep-learning-onto-pre-1900-mathematics]]
  both already flag the vault's "single-witness" pattern for Schmidhuber's
  own historical framings — this capture's Abstract-vs-section-header finding
  is a small addition to that same pattern (his most-quoted sentence is a
  compression, not the document's structural spine).

## Entity candidates
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — person — the foundational figure the "chain
  rule (1676)" entry rests on; not yet checked against the vault's retrieval
  list for an existing entity page.
- Adrien-Marie Legendre and Carl Friedrich Gauss — persons — the foundational
  figures the "first NNs (circa 1800)" entry rests on (Schmidhuber credits
  Legendre's 1805 publication and Gauss's earlier unpublished 1795 work); the
  paper explicitly says NN authors of the 1940s-50s were "unaware" of this
  earlier pair, a priority-erasure claim in its own right.
- Leonardo Torres y Quevedo — person — the foundational figure the "first
  practical AI (1914)" entry rests on (built the chess end-game automaton);
  the figure this whole capture's third claim measures Schmidhuber's hedging
  choices against.
- [[entity-juergen-schmidhuber]] — already exists in the vault; this capture
  adds no update to it beyond what's already recorded, flagged here only for
  completeness since the whole document is his.

## Safety flags
None. Both pages fetched this session (arxiv.org/pdf/2212.11279 via
`extract_pdf`, arxiv.org/abs/2212.11279 via `archive_page`) returned ordinary
academic paper content — an abstract, table of contents, body sections, and
a references list. No addressed-to-AI language, override language, claimed
authority, tier self-assignment, file-system instructions, credential
requests, or urgency framing observed. Both fetches recorded `tls:
"verified"` (the PDF fetch's provenance field), so no elevated-suspicion
handling applies.