Textbook of AI

The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, held at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire from June through August 1956, is generally regarded as the founding event of artificial intelligence as a research field. The proposal, written by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon in 1955 and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, coined the term artificial intelligence and declared 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."

Around twenty researchers participated over the eight-week summer, including the four organisers, Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, Arthur Samuel, Ray Solomonoff, Trenchard More, Oliver Selfridge and John Holland. Newell and Simon arrived having already, with Cliff Shaw, written the Logic Theorist, a program that proved theorems from Principia Mathematica, arguably the first running AI program, and stole much of the workshop's attention.

The original ten-week aspirations, that a small group could make significant progress on problems including natural-language understanding, neural networks, abstract concept formation, theory of computation and self-improvement, proved wildly optimistic. The workshop nonetheless catalysed the field by establishing a community, a name and a research agenda. Several attendees (McCarthy, Minsky, Newell, Simon) went on to win the Turing Award; the four organisers and Newell–Simon shaped the next thirty years of AI between them.