The Dartmouth WorkshopThe Dartmouth Workshop

In the summer of 1955, a young Dartmouth mathematician named John McCarthy drafted a funding proposal with Marvin Minsky, IBM's Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon of Bell Labs. It asked the Rockefeller Foundation to pay for ten researchers to spend two months at Dartmouth College studying a bold conjecture: that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence could in principle be described so precisely that a machine could simulate it.

McCarthy needed a name for this new subject, one that would set it apart from the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener and the automata theory of the day. He chose 'artificial intelligence', and the phrase stuck. The proposal itself is arguably the founding document of the field.

The workshop ran through the summer of 1956, less a structured conference than a rolling series of conversations. Attendees came and went, and the group never converged on a shared research agenda. The proposal's optimism, that significant progress could be made in a single summer, turned out to be off by decades.

One concrete result did arrive: Allen Newell and Herbert Simon showed up from Carnegie Tech with the Logic Theorist, a program that could actually prove mathematical theorems. It was the closest thing the workshop had to a working demonstration of machine intelligence, and it stole the show.

The Dartmouth workshop mattered less for what it produced than for what it declared. It gave a scattered set of ideas a name, a community, and a shared ambition. Nearly every major early AI lab, at MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon, traces its lineage to people who were in those rooms.