In the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon organized a two-month workshop to explore machines that could simulate aspects of intelligence. McCarthy insisted on the name artificial intelligence.
Attendees included Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, already working on the Logic Theorist. The meeting mixed extreme optimism with divergent agendas: heuristic search, networks, language, creativity.
Dartmouth did not solve AI; it institutionalized it. Since then, cycles of promises and winters are measured against that founding ambition: automate facets of human thought in a “summer”… that is still ongoing.
