The Dartmouth Workshop — Naming Artificial Intelligence

On 31 August 1955, John McCarthy wrote a funding proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation. It opened: "We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College."

It was the first appearance of the phrase 'artificial intelligence' in an official research document.

Why Dartmouth

McCarthy was, at the time, an assistant professor at Dartmouth. Twenty-eight years old. He chose Dartmouth because it was his own institution. But the roster of attendees was singular.

• Marvin Minsky (Princeton) — would later found the MIT AI Lab
• Claude Shannon (Bell Labs) — founder of information theory
• Nathaniel Rochester (IBM) — designer of the IBM 701
• Allen Newell and Herbert Simon (Carnegie Tech) — soon to write the Logic Theorist
• Arthur Samuel (IBM) — author of an early learning program for checkers

The proposal stated that the work would 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."

What Actually Happened

The workshop ran from June to August 1956. The proposed "2 months" did not mean all participants stayed throughout; people came and went.

The most concrete technical contribution was the Logic Theorist that Newell and Simon brought with them—a program that proved theorems in formal mathematics. It had succeeded in proving several theorems from Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, in some cases by routes their authors had not anticipated.

But as a whole, most participants later recalled that the integration they had hoped for did not really happen.

Why It Was Still Historic

Dartmouth is called the birth of artificial intelligence not for its technology but for its vocabulary and its network.

• Vocabulary. 'Artificial intelligence' became the field's official name. Before Dartmouth several names competed—'automata theory', 'thinking machines', 'cybernetics'.
• Network. The participants, and the networks branching out from them, were at the centre of AI research at MIT, Stanford, CMU, and IBM for the next two decades.

The first AI summer, from 1956 to the mid-1970s, ran on exactly this network. The papers they wrote, the students they trained, the DARPA grants they secured—these built the discipline.

And underneath the first winter (late 1970s), the expert-system second summer (1980s), the second winter (early 1990s), and the present, still-running deep-learning summer (since 2012), the vocabulary chosen at Dartmouth has run beneath them all.