Today in 1955, the term “artificial intelligence” was coined in a proposal for a “2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence” submitted by John McCarthy (Dartmouth College), Marvin Minsky (Harvard University), Nathaniel Rochester (IBM), and Claude Shannon (Bell Telephone Laboratories).
The workshop, which took place a year later, in July and August 1956, is generally recognized as the official birthdate of the new field.
The proposal defined what its authors meant by “artificial intelligence”:
An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. … For the present purpose the artificial intelligence problem is taken to be that of making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving.
And it promised results:
We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.
In July 13-15, 2006, the Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Conference: The Next Fifty Years (AI@50), commemorated the 50th anniversary of the original “Dartmouth Conference.” Five of the original ten attendees were present: Marvin Minsky, Ray Solomonoff, Oliver Selfridge, Trenchard More, and John McCarthy. The conference director, James Moor, published a summary report (PDF) in AI Magazine. It reads, in part:
Dating the beginning of any movement is difficult, but the Dartmouth Summer Research Project of 1956 is often taken as the event that initiated AI as a research discipline. John McCarthy, a mathematics professor at Dartmouth at the time, had been disappointed that the papers in Automata Studies, which he co-edited with Claude Shannon, did not say more about the possibilities of computers possessing intelligence. Thus, in the proposal written by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, and Nathaniel Rochester for the 1956 event, McCarthy wanted, as he explained at AI@50, “to nail the flag to the mast.” McCarthy is credited for coining the phrase “artificial intelligence” and solidifying the orientation of the field. It is interesting to speculate whether the field would have been any different had it been called “computational intelligence” or any of a number of other possible labels.
When John McCarthy received the 1971 Turing Award, Lester Earnest included the following in his summary of McCarthy’s career:
Given that McCarthy was primarily a mathematician and technologist who had little use for puffery, it is ironic that his most widely recognized contribution turned out to be in the field of marketing, specifically in choosing a brand name for the field. Having noticed that the title of the Automata Studies book didn’t stir up much excitement, when he subsequently moved to Dartmouth College he introduced the name artificial intelligence at a 1956 conference there and saw that it was embraced both by people working in the field and the general public.