The 1956 Dartmouth Workshop and its Immediate Consequences: The Origins of Artificial Intelligence

In the summer of 1955, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, Claude Shannon and John McCarthy proposed a summer workshop on artificial intelligence to be held at Dartmouth in the summer of 1956. It was hoped that the workshop would bring in new ideas and make substantial progress on the AI problem.

In a proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation, the team used what was apparently the first appearance of the phrase "artificial intelligence."

They hoped to prove 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. 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.