AIster · Prologue · Events
The Dartmouth workshop gives the field its name
The 1955 proposal coined “artificial intelligence”, and the 1956 study launched the field
Key facts
- Date
- Summer 1956
- Era
- Prologue
- Interest
- Events
- Threads
- Labs & people
- Organisers
- John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, Claude Shannon
- Proposal dated
- 31 Aug 1955
- Where
- Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire
- Funding
- Requested from the Rockefeller Foundation
In a proposal dated 31 August 1955, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon asked for a two-month study of “artificial intelligence” at Dartmouth College the following summer. The workshop ran in 1956 and is usually treated as the founding event of AI as a research field.
Sources
- Stanford University (John McCarthy archive), A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, 1955-08-31
- Dartmouth College, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Coined at Dartmouth, 2026-10-01