Dartmouth College

What Dartmouth is

Dartmouth College is a private Ivy League college in Hanover, New Hampshire.^[1] It was founded by royal charter on 13 December 1769, granted to the minister Eleazar Wheelock.^[1] Its place in the history of computing rests on a document written there nearly two centuries later.

The 1955 proposal

John McCarthy was an assistant professor at Dartmouth from 1955, before he moved to MIT in 1958.^[5] At Dartmouth he was the organiser behind a short text dated 31 August 1955, the "Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence", written with Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon. That proposal is credited with introducing the term "artificial intelligence".^[3]

It opens with a plain statement of intent: "We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire".^[3] The authors asked the Rockefeller Foundation for a budget totalling $13,500.^[3] The wording is worth noticing. The proposal did not describe a single experiment or a single machine; it named a field, and offered a place and a date for the people working on related questions to meet under that name.

The summer of 1956

The workshop itself ran for roughly eight weeks, from about 18 June to 17 August 1956.^[4] The group had the top floor of the Dartmouth mathematics department and met most weekdays in its main classroom.^[4] Ray Solomonoff's list of about 20 attendees includes McCarthy, Minsky, Shannon, Rochester, Oliver Selfridge, Warren McCulloch, John Nash, Arthur Samuel, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell.^[4] The mix is telling: mathematicians, engineers, psychologists and economists, most of whom had arrived at questions about machines and thought from different directions.

McCarthy organised the project and wrote its proposal.^[2] According to the philosophy professor James Moor, the project aimed to make machines more cognizant and to build a framework for understanding human intelligence.^[2] Those two aims — building systems, and using them to think about what intelligence is — shaped how the field described itself for decades afterwards.

Dartmouth describes the 1956 summer project as the birth of artificial intelligence as a field.^[2] That is the college's own framing, but the record supports its core: a name, a community and an ambition came together in one place in one summer.

Beyond that summer

Dartmouth's connection to computing did not end there. Dartmouth faculty also developed the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System and the BASIC programming language.^[1] Time-sharing allowed many users to work on one machine at the same time, and BASIC was a language designed to be simple enough for beginners. Both choices point in the same direction as the 1956 project: making computers something people could approach directly, rather than instruments reserved for specialists.

Why it matters

For the history of artificial intelligence, Dartmouth is a starting point rather than a research laboratory. The event it hosted was small — about 20 participants, a modest budget, a borrowed floor of a mathematics building — and its importance is not that it produced a finished technology, but that it gave a scattered set of researchers a shared name and a shared expectation that machines could be made to do work we associate with thinking. Almost every later account of the field begins with that summer, and the term introduced in the 1955 proposal is the one still used today.