The Dartmouth College Artificial Intelligence Conference: The Next Fifty Years

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. Five of the attendees from the original project attended AI@50 (figure 1). Each gave some recollections. McCarthy acknowledged that the 1956 project did not live up to expectations in terms of collaboration. The attendees did not come at the same time and most kept to their own research agenda. McCarthy emphasized that nevertheless there were important research developments at the time, particularly Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw, and Herbert Simon’s Information Processing Language (IPL) and the Logic Theory Machine. Marvin Minsky commented that, although he had been working on neural nets for his dissertation a few years prior to the 1956 project, he dis■ The Dartmouth College Artificial Intelligence Conference: The Next 50 Years (AI@50) took place July 13–15, 2006. The conference had three objectives: to celebrate the Dartmouth Summer Research Project, which occurred in 1956; to assess how far AI has progressed; and to project where AI is going or should be going. AI@50 was generously funded by the office of the Dean of Faculty and the office of the Provost at Dartmouth College, by DARPA, and by some private donors.