The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence takes place

The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was held in the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. It is widely described as the founding event of artificial intelligence as a research field, and Dartmouth College calls it the birth of AI.^[2]

Background

The workshop was organised by John McCarthy on the basis of a 1955 proposal he wrote with Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon.^[3]

What happened

People often say the workshop lasted six weeks. Ray Solomonoff's notes put it at roughly eight weeks, from about 18 June to 17 August 1956, when Solomonoff gave a final talk.^[1]

The plans and the reality differed. On 26 May 1956 McCarthy told the Rockefeller Foundation's Robert Morison that 11 attendees were planned. In practice, participants came and went at different times, mostly for short periods. Only Solomonoff, Minsky and McCarthy stayed for the full eight weeks.^[1]

Solomonoff's list of 20 actual attendees includes McCarthy, Minsky, Shannon, Rochester, Oliver Selfridge, Trenchard More, Julian Bigelow, W. Ross Ashby, Warren McCulloch, Abraham Robinson, John Nash, Arthur Samuel, Alex Bernstein, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell.^[1]

Key details

The group had the top floor of the Dartmouth mathematics department and met most weekdays in its main classroom. Daily sessions drew from three to about eight people.^[1]

Accounts of the workshop differ on basic facts such as how long it lasted. That is why the length given in Solomonoff's notes is worth stating with its source, and why the six-week figure should be treated with caution.

Discussions covered a wide range of topics. McCarthy was interested in chess programs, possibly on the IBM 704. Solomonoff discussed his inductive inference machine. Newell, Shaw and Simon discussed their "Logic Theorist," a symbolic reasoning program that became a forerunner of early AI programs.^[1]

Solomonoff's list also shows the spread of interests, from neuron models and logic to chess and inductive inference. That breadth suggests the field had not yet settled on a single method.

Influence

McCarthy later said the original intention was for the whole group to meet for the whole summer. The Rockefeller Foundation did not provide nearly enough money, and people had other commitments. He noted in 1996 that no report was produced.^[1]

Because people came and went, the workshop worked more like a shifting seminar than a fixed team.

The workshop brought together people who would shape the field, and it gave the new name a first set of working topics: symbolic reasoning, inductive inference and game-playing programs.

For readers, the event is best understood as the point where a name, a proposal and a group of people came together, rather than as a finished achievement. The proposal had set out the goals; the workshop tested how far a loose group could pursue them over one summer.