artificial-intelligence symbolic-ai
Definition
Dartmouth Workshop
The Dartmouth Workshop, officially the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, was a 1956 summer brainstorming session at Dartmouth College, widely considered the founding event of artificial intelligence as a formal academic discipline. It was organised by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon with the explicit goal of exploring the hypothesis that “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”.
Historical Significance
The Coining of AI: The workshop is primarily remembered for John McCarthy’s successful introduction of the term “Artificial Intelligence” to distinguish the field from “Cybernetics” or “Automata Theory”. This nomenclature shift signalled a move towards symbolic processing and high-level cognitive modelling rather than purely biological or feedback-based systems.
Participants and Contributions: The session brought together the most influential figures of the era. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon demonstrated the Logic Theorist, the first program engineered specifically to mimic human problem-solving skills, which successfully proved theorems from Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica.
The Proposal’s Scope: The original proposal outlined seven areas of focus: automatic computers, language processing, neuron nets, theory of size of a calculation, self-improvement, abstractions, and randomness. This breadth established the research agenda that would dominate the first few decades of the field’s development.