Dartmouth Marks 70 Years of AI

The term "artificial intelligence" was first formally proposed in a 1955 grant application for the original 1956 workshop. The authors—John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon—were seeking $13,500 from the Rockefeller Foundation to fund the two-month, 10-person study. The project's foundational belief was a bold conjecture: "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." The organizers planned to explore how to make machines use language, form abstractions, and solve problems then reserved for humans. The two-month-long event was more of an extended brainstorming session than a structured conference, with participants coming and going throughout the summer. Among the attendees who would become luminaries in the field were Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, who presented their Logic Theory Machine, an early program capable of automated reasoning. Discussions at the workshop laid the groundwork for many areas of AI research still relevant today, including neural networks, natural language processing, and the theory of computation. The interdisciplinary mix of mathematicians, computer scientists, and a neurophysiologist set a precedent for the collaborative nature of the field. While the workshop successfully established AI as a formal field of study, the initial optimism was followed by a period of reduced funding and interest known as the "AI winter." This was largely due to the immense difficulty of the problems a small group of scientists hoped to make significant headway on in a single summer.