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This article is about conferences related to artificial intelligence. For the peace process conferences, see Dartmouth Conference.

1956 scientific conference on artificial intelligence

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The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was a 1956 summer workshop widely considered[1][2][3] to be the founding event of artificial intelligence as a field.[4] The workshop has been referred to as "the Constitutional Convention of AI".[5] The project's four organizers, Claude Shannon, John McCarthy, Nathaniel Rochester and Marvin Minsky, are considered some of the "founding fathers" of AI.[6][7] However it was not the first conference devoted to what would now be described as the question of artificial intelligence: it postdated meetings such as the 1951 Paris cybernetics conference[8] and the Macy meetings.

The project lasted approximately six to eight weeks and consisted largely of brainstorming sessions. Eleven mathematicians and scientists originally planned to attend; not all of them attended, but more than ten others came for short times.

Background<br>[edit]

In the early 1950s, there were various names for the field of "thinking machines": cybernetics, automata theory, and complex information processing.[9] The variety of names suggests the variety of conceptual orientations.

In 1955, John McCarthy, then a young Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth College, decided to organize a group to clarify and develop ideas about thinking machines. He picked the name 'Artificial Intelligence' for the new field. He chose the name partly for its neutrality; avoiding a focus on narrow automata theory, and avoiding cybernetics which was heavily focused on analog feedback, as well as him potentially having to accept the assertive Norbert Wiener as guru or having to argue with him.[10]

In early 1955, McCarthy approached the Rockefeller Foundation to request funding for a summer seminar at Dartmouth for about 10 participants. In June, he and Claude Shannon, a founder of information theory then at Bell Labs, met with Robert Morison, Director of Biological and Medical Research to discuss the idea and possible funding, though Morison was unsure whether money would be made available for such a visionary project.[11]

On September 2, 1955, the project was formally proposed by McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon. The proposal is credited with introducing the term 'artificial intelligence'.

The Proposal states:[12][13]

We propose that a 2-month, 10-man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The study is to proceed on the basis of the 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 in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.

The proposal goes on to discuss computers, natural language processing, neural networks, theory of computation, abstraction and creativity (these areas within the field of artificial intelligence...