Although Dartmouth is often noted as the birthplace of BASIC programming language, not as many people realize that it is also where Artificial Intelligence was created as an academic discipline. In the summer of 1956, a six to eight week workshop met on the top floor of the Dartmouth Mathematics Department. The workshop was the brainchild of Dartmouth Assistant Professor of Mathematics John McCarthy, who had coined the term 'artificial intelligence' in a proposal that he submitted along with Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon, now known in the field as some of the "founding fathers" of the discipline.The summer session was less of an intensive conference and more of a rolling series of talks and meetings, with a varying cast of characters in attendance at any given time. Some of the topics that were discussed included the rise of symbolic methods, systems focused on limited domains, and deductive systems versus inductive systems. Unfortunately, because the event wasn't formally sponsored or organized by the college, we don't have a lot of archival documents related to the workshop. However, what we do have has been digitized and is available for exploration online. To see a pdf of the original proposal, visit the Office of Communications' finding aid online (DA-29, Box 2898, Folder 27). You can also look through the vertical file on Artificial Intelligence. Both folders can also be looked through in person at Rauner.
