AI got its name from a summer workshop proposal
In 1955 four researchers asked for funding for “a 2-month, 10-man study of artificial intelligence”, confident they could make a significant advance in one summer.
In 1955, a young mathematician at Dartmouth College, John McCarthy, joined three others to write a funding proposal: Marvin Minsky of Harvard, Nathaniel Rochester of IBM, and Claude Shannon of Bell Labs, the founder of information theory.
They proposed “a 2-month, 10-man study of artificial intelligence … during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College.”
The name
That proposal is where the phrase artificial intelligence comes from. McCarthy chose it partly for its neutrality, to avoid narrow “automata theory” and the then-fashionable cybernetics, a field built on analogue feedback and control.
The confidence
The proposal’s central conjecture was 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.” And it predicted that “a significant advance can be made … if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.”
What actually happened
The workshop ran for roughly six to eight weeks in summer 1956, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. People came and went. Among them were Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, who brought the Logic Theorist, a program that proved theorems from Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica.
No single breakthrough came out of that summer. But the workshop named the field and gathered the people who would lead it for the next two decades, and it set the tone of confident, ambitious prediction that would later cause trouble.
“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.”
Bring it up
“The founders of AI thought a group of ten researchers could make significant progress in a single summer. That was 1956.”
Follow the thread
- Influenced“Can machines think?”: Turing’s 1950 question Turing asked the question; Dartmouth turned it into a research programme.
- Leads toIn 1958 the Navy said its neural network would one day be conscious The confident early years produced spectacular promises.
- Leads toAI has gone through “winters” before The gap between those promises and results eventually caused funding to collapse.
