Dartmouth Workshop 1956: the birth of AI
The Dartmouth Workshop of 1956 was organized by Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy and two senior scientists: Claude Shannon and Nathan Rochester of IBM. The proposal for the conference included this assertion: "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it". The participants included Ray Solomonoff, Oliver Selfridge, Trenchard More, Arthur Samuel, Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon, all of whom would create important programs during the first decades of AI research. At the workshop Newell and Simon debuted the "Logic Theorist" and McCarthy persuaded the attendees to accept "Artificial Intelligence" as the name of the field. The 1956 Dartmouth workshop was the moment that AI gained its name, its mission, its first success and its major players, and is widely considered the birth of AI. The term "Artificial Intelligence" was chosen by McCarthy to avoid associations with cybernetics and connections with the influential cyberneticist Norbert Wiener.
When and where was the field of AI officially born?
The field of AI was officially born in 1956 during a workshop organised at Dartmouth College