The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence is considered to be an important event in the history of AI and where the term artificial intelligence, selected by computer scientist John McCarthy (pictured here in 1974), started to gain acceptance.

1956

DARTMOUTH AI WORKSHOP

“In the summer of 1956,” writes journalist Luke Dormehl, “when Elvis Presley was scandalizing audiences with his hip gyrations . . . and President Dwight Eisenhower authorized ‘In God we trust’ as the US national motto—AI’s first official conference took place.” That conference—the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence—is where the term artificial intelligence, coined by computer scientist John McCarthy (1927–2011), started to gain acceptance.

The workshop was formally proposed by McCarthy of Dartmouth College, Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) of Harvard University, Nathaniel Rochester (1919–2001) of IBM, and Claude Shannon (1916–2001) of Bell Telephone Laboratories, as follows: “We propose that a 2-month, 10-man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer. . . . [We conjecture] that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made . . . if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.” The proposal also made specific mention of several other key areas of consideration, including “neuron nets” and “randomness and creativity.”

During the meeting, Carnegie Mellon’s Allen Newell (1927–1992) and Herbert Simon (1916–2001) presented their Logic Theorist, a program for proving theorems in symbolic logic. Author Pamela McCorduck writes about the Dartmouth Workshop: “They had in common a belief . . . that what we call thinking could indeed take place outside the human cranium, that it could be understood in a formal and scientific way, and that the best nonhuman instrument for doing it was the digital computer.”

Partly because of the complexity of AI technology, and because meeting participants came and went on different dates, the expectations for the conference were probably a bit too high. Nevertheless, the Dartmouth AI workshop brought together a diverse group of researchers who influenced the field for the next twenty years.