The term “artificial intelligence” was coined in a short proposal written on August 31, 1955 by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon. The proposal requested funding for a two-month, ten-person study to be held during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The event itself, the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, gives this milestone its 1956 name, though the founding document is dated 1955.
The proposal stated the field’s core bet plainly: “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.” It laid out seven research areas, including automatic computers, programming languages, neuron nets, and machine self-improvement.
The Dartmouth project is widely regarded as the founding event of artificial intelligence as a named discipline. It brought together many of the people who would define the field for decades and established the ambition, to build machines that simulate intelligence, that still drives the research today.