The Dartmouth Workshop (birth of Artificial Intelligence)

Editorial record

Plain-language summary

In the summer of 1956, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon organized a workshop at Dartmouth College to study whether machines could be made to reason, learn, and use language. Their proposal coined the term 'artificial intelligence' and argued that every aspect of intelligence could in principle be specified well enough to be automated. The meeting gathered the researchers who would lead the field for decades. It set the research directions, from problem solving to language and learning, that defined AI's first generation.