Dartmouth 1956: The Summer That Named a Field

In August 1955, John McCarthy, a 27-year-old assistant professor at Dartmouth, wrote a proposal with Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon for a summer research project. The document is less than two pages. It proposes studying "the conjecture 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." And it uses, almost in passing, a phrase that would define the next 70 years of science: "artificial intelligence."

The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence ran for six weeks in the summer of 1956. McCarthy had hoped for 10 researchers; about that number showed up, though rarely all at once. The participants included Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, who brought their "Logic Theorist," a program that had proved 38 of the 52 theorems in Principia Mathematica and was arguably the first AI program. They also brought ideas that would take decades to bear fruit.

The workshop produced no unified theory, no major published paper. What it produced was a community. McCarthy, Minsky, Newell, Simon, Shannon, people who would go on to define the field, spent six weeks together, sharing ideas, arguing about what "intelligence" even meant. The term "artificial intelligence" propagated from that summer into academic departments, funding agencies, and eventually popular culture.

McCarthy later reflected that choosing the phrase "artificial intelligence" over alternatives like "complex information processing" was perhaps a mistake, it raised expectations impossibly high. When the field couldn't deliver general intelligence in 10 years (as many had promised), the funding dried up in what became the first AI winter. The name had written a check that the science couldn't cash.

The Dartmouth proposal is a peculiar historical document: confident, vague, and wildly optimistic. Its authors expected to make "significant advances" in the summer of 1956. It took until 2024 for one of those authors, Geoffrey Hinton, who joined the field a generation later, to win a Nobel Prize. The summer that named a field was the beginning of a much longer story than anyone in the room expected.