EVENT
The Dartmouth Workshop of 1956
The 1956 summer workshop at Dartmouth College where the phrase "artificial intelligence" was coined and the field, as a discipline, began.
The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was an eight-week workshop convened in the summer of 1956 by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon. It is the event that named the field — the funding proposal, written in 1955, is the first document to use the phrase "artificial intelligence". Although the workshop itself produced no single breakthrough, it established the community, vocabulary, and research agenda that the field would follow for the next two decades.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Dartmouth Workshop sits at the origin of every subsequent conversation about AI. When contemporary writers ask "what is artificial intelligence?", the historical answer runs back to this summer in Hanover, New Hampshire. The proposal's famous phrasing — 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" — set the field's animating ambition and its founding controversy.
The proposal's optimism was