What happened at a small Dartmouth workshop in 1956 that gave artificial intelligence its name?
A six-week summer workshop invented an entire scientific field - and coined the term 'artificial intelligence.'
The answer
In the summer of 1956, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon organized a workshop at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Their proposal boldly stated 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.' Although only about 10 researchers attended at any given time during the 8-week event, the workshop established AI as a formal academic discipline and its attendees - including Allen Newell and Herbert Simon - went on to dominate the field for decades.
Source: Dartmouth College
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