> The Dartmouth Conference_

In the summer of 1955, a 28-year-old assistant professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College named John McCarthy sat down and wrote one of the most audacious grant proposals in the history of science. Together with Marvin Minsky (a 28-year-old Harvard Junior Fellow), Nathaniel Rochester (the architect of IBM's first commercial computer), and Claude Shannon (the father of information theory), McCarthy proposed "a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence" to be carried out during the summer of 1956 in Hanover, New Hampshire. The proposal, submitted to the Rockefeller Foundation, contained a claim of breathtaking optimism: "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."

The Rockefeller Foundation funded the workshop with a grant of $7,500 — roughly $80,000 in today's dollars. The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence ran for six weeks in the summer of 1956, though in practice the ten core participants came and went on staggered schedules. Among the attendees were some of the most brilliant minds in computing: Herbert Simon and Allen Newell brought their "Logic Theorist," a program that could prove mathematical theorems from Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica. It had successfully proven 38 of the first 52 theorems, and for one theorem, it found a proof more elegant than the original. Simon and Newell boldly told the group they had "invented a thinking machine."

The conference did not produce a breakthrough or a consensus. In fact, the participants spent much of their time arguing. McCarthy was interested in symbolic logic and search. Minsky was obsessed with neural networks and perception. Simon and Newell cared about problem-solving and cognitive simulation. Rochester was focused on hardware. Shannon was characteristically quiet and brilliant, contributing ideas without advocating for any particular approach. The six weeks ended without a unified theory of artificial intelligence — but with something arguably more important: a name. McCarthy had coined the term "artificial intelligence" specifically for the proposal, choosing it over alternatives like "automata studies" or "complex information processing" because it was bold, provocative, and impossible to ignore.

The aftermath of Dartmouth shaped the field for decades. McCarthy went on to invent LISP in 1958, which became the dominant programming language for AI research for the next 30 years. He also developed the concept of time-sharing, which made computers accessible to multiple users simultaneously — a distant ancestor of cloud computing. Minsky co-founded the MIT AI Lab and became AI's most visible evangelist and, later, its most controversial critic. Simon and Newell continued building thinking machines at Carnegie Mellon, eventually winning the Turing Award. The optimism of that summer — the genuine belief that human-level AI was a decade or two away — would prove wildly premature. But the Dartmouth Conference established artificial intelligence as a field with a name, a community, and a mission. Every AI lab, every startup, every neural network in existence today can trace its intellectual lineage back to that small gathering in New Hampshire.