From 24 to 27 November 1958 the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington, England, held a symposium titled “Mechanisation of Thought Processes.” The proceedings were published in 1959 by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office as a two-volume set running close to a thousand pages. Coming two years after the 1956 Dartmouth workshop, it was one of the first large international gatherings of researchers working on what would become artificial intelligence, and it brought together British and American lines of work that had been developing somewhat separately.
The program included several papers that are now landmarks. John McCarthy presented “Programs with Common Sense,” which proposed a hypothetical reasoning system, the advice taker, that would draw conclusions from facts stated in formal logic. Oliver Selfridge presented “Pandemonium: A Paradigm for Learning,” an early model of pattern recognition built from many simple parallel units. Other contributors covered neural and learning machines, self-organizing systems, and the use of computers for tasks previously thought to require human thought.
The symposium matters because it shows the field consolidating. Ideas about logic-based reasoning, learning, and pattern recognition that are still central to AI were being laid out and debated side by side, in print, only a few years after the term artificial intelligence was coined. The primary source used here is the scanned proceedings held by the Internet Archive.
For a general reader, the event is a useful marker of when AI stopped being a handful of isolated experiments and started becoming an organized research community with shared questions.