August 31, 1955
Dartmouth AI summer research proposal
John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon submitted their Dartmouth proposal on August 31, 1955 — the document that coined the term artificial intelligenceSoftware that performs tasks associated with human intelligence — perception, reasoning, and learning..
What it was for
The four-page proposal requested funding for a 1956 summer study on making machines learn, use language, and solve human-level problems. McCarthy invented the phrase 'artificial intelligenceSoftware that performs tasks associated with human intelligence — perception, reasoning, and learning.' for the grant application; the workshop it launched became the field's founding event.
People
- John McCarthy — researcher
- Marvin Minsky — researcher
- Claude Shannon — researcher
- Nathaniel Rochester — researcher
Why it's here
This proposal named the field and framed AI as an engineering summer project.
Why it mattered
It united logic, neuroscience, and computing under one research agenda.
What it solved
Machine learningSystems that learn patterns from data rather than following only explicit programmed rules. and reasoningStep-by-step logical thinking in AI models — chain-of-thought before answering hard problems. research lacked a shared name, goal, and funding pitch.
Media
ImageMarvin MinskySethwoodworth at English Wikipedia, taken by Bcjordan, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons