Dartmouth Workshop (1956)

The Dartmouth Workshop, held in the summer of 1956 on the Dartmouth College campus, is the founding event of artificial intelligence as a research discipline. The workshop was organized by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon, and the proposal that secured its funding coined the term artificial intelligence — the first use of the phrase in the sense it subsequently acquired. Simon and Newell attended not as organizers but as participants, bringing with them the Logic Theorist, a computer program they had built at Carnegie Institute of Technology that could prove theorems from Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica. The Logic Theorist was the first working program that demonstrated what later became known as AI capability — automated reasoning in a domain that had previously required human intelligence. Simon and Newell's participation shifted the workshop's intellectual center toward their information-processing approach to cognition, establishing the paradigm that would dominate AI research for the next three decades. The workshop is conventionally treated as