The Dartmouth Conference — AI is Born

In the summer of 1956, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon organized a workshop at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, proposing to study "artificial intelligence" — a term McCarthy coined for the occasion. The proposal boldly stated: "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." About 20 researchers attended the two-month workshop, including Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, who demonstrated the Logic Theorist — a program that could prove mathematical theorems. While the conference produced no breakthrough, it established AI as a distinct field of research, defined its ambitions, and launched the careers of its founding generation.