The Dartmouth Workshop names 'artificial intelligence'
Four researchers write a summer research proposal and coin a field
Quick facts
- Proposers
- McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester, Shannon
- Location
- Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire
- Proposal dated
- 31 August 1955
What happened
John McCarthy of Dartmouth College, Marvin Minsky of Harvard, Nathaniel Rochester of IBM, and Claude Shannon of Bell Telephone Laboratories submitted a proposal dated August 31, 1955 for a two-month, ten-person study to be held at Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956. The proposal stated the founding conjecture of the field: that every aspect of learning or intelligence could in principle be described precisely enough that a machine could be made to simulate it. It listed specific problems to attack, including how to make a computer use language, form abstractions, and improve itself, and it used the phrase 'artificial intelligence' to describe the whole undertaking, the term's first recorded appearance. The workshop itself ran through the summer with a rotating cast of attendees rather than the full ten researchers working continuously.
Why it matters
The workshop did not solve any of its stated problems that summer, but it gave the new field a name, brought its founding researchers into direct contact, and set the research agenda, symbolic reasoning, language, and self-improvement, that dominated AI for the next two decades.
How we know
The original 1955 proposal survives and is archived on John McCarthy's own Stanford page; it contains the term 'artificial intelligence' and the study's stated goals verbatim.
Sources
- J. McCarthy, M. L. Minsky, N. Rochester, C. E. Shannon. A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence · Primary source (author-declared)jmc.stanford.edu · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match).
- Computer History Museum. The 1956 Dartmouth Workshop and its Immediate Consequences: The Origins of Artificial Intelligence · Reputable sourcecomputerhistory.org · The domain "computerhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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