Birth of Artificial Intelligence

Princeton was home another influential figure in AI, John McCarthy. After graduation, McCarthy moved to Darmouth College, which was to become the official birthplace of the field. McCarthy convinced Minsky, Calude Shannon, and Nathaniel Rochester to help him bring together U.S. researchers interested in automata theory, neural nets, and the study of intelligence. They organized a two month workshop at Dartmouth in the summer of1956. There were 10 attendees in all, including Trenchard More from Princeton, Arthur Samuel from IBM and Ray Solomonoff and Oliver Selfridge from MIT.
Two researchers from Carnegie Tech, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon rather stole the show. Although the others had ideas and in some cases programs for particular applications such as checkers, Newell and Simon already had a reasoning program, the Logic Theorist about which Simon claimed, "We have invented a computer program capable of thinking non-numerically and thereby solved the venerable mind body problem". Soon after the workshop, the Principia Mathematica, Russell was reportedly delighted when Simon showed him that the program had come up with a proof for one theorem that was shorter than the one in principal. The editors of the Journal of Symbolic Logic were less impressed; they rejected a paper coauthored by Newell, Simon and Logic Theorist.
The Dartmouth workshop did not lead breakthroughs, but it did introduce all the major figures to each other. For the next 20 years, the field would be dominated by these people and their students and colleagues at MIT, CMU, Stanford and IBM. Perhaps the longest lasting thing to come out of the workshop was an agreement to adopt McCarthy's new name for the field ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.