Math professor John McCarthy had an audacious idea back in 1956. At a time when computers could barely play tic-tac-toe, he proposed building an intelligent machine that could imitate the human mind. With three fellow researchers—Marvin Minsky from Harvard, Nathaniel Rochester from IBM Corp., and Claude Shannon from Bell Telephone Laboratories—McCarthy asked the Rockefeller Foundation to fund a conference that would bring together logicians, mathematicians, and engineers to help create the thinking machine. To clarify the scope of their ambitions, the researchers coined the term “artificial intelligence.” McCarthy was bullish on their prospects.
“I hope that by summer 1956 I will have a model of such a machine fairly close to the stage of programming in a computer,” he wrote.
The Rockefeller Foundation didn’t think much of the proposal and awarded only half of the requested $14,000 in grant money. Even that was more than enough to finance what would become known as the “Dartmouth Workshop.” During the course of eight weeks in the summer of 1956, some of America’s top scientists came together at the College to crack the problem of how to make intelligent machines.
In 1949 legendary British scientist Alan Turing suggested that a machine could be considered “intelligent” if, in a five-minute conversation, it could fool human beings into believing they are interacting with a fellow human. He challenged the scientific community to create such a machine.
About 20 eminent scientists (all male) participated in the Dartmouth Workshop. Some brought their families and spent the whole summer on campus. Others stopped by for just a few days or a few hours. Conference notes, preserved in the Rauner Special Collections, detail some of the goings-on.
“McCarthy has become increasingly interested in the problem of writing a program that will write programs,” mathematician Trenchard More reported during the fifth week of the workshop. Warren McCulloch, an eminent neurophysiologist from MIT, stopped by for a few hours to discuss his view that the human brain is “a Turing Machine.”
The conference didn’t come close to building the thinking machine McCarthy had envisioned, but the term “artificial intelligence” stuck.
“We can honestly say that AI was born here at Dartmouth,” says Dan Rockmore, professor of math and computer science and director of Dartmouth’s Neukom Institute for Computational Science. In 2006 Rockmore interviewed many of the aging participants of the workshop as he coproduced a documentary to celebrate its 50th anniversary.
“If those guys would still be around today,” says Rockmore, “I think they would be delighted by the turn things have taken.”
Only a few hundred computers existed in the world in 1956, each the size of a room and together offering only a fraction of the processing power of an average smartphone today. When the workshop failed to deliver, AI was dismissed as a pipe dream and research funding dried up.
“Even if it took a while to realize these ideas,” says Peter Chin, professor of engineering at the Thayer School, “the Dartmouth Workshop turned AI research into a scientific discipline of its own.”
Chin leads the faculty committee responsible for planning the 70th anniversary of the Dartmouth Workshop, which will be celebrated this fall. One event being considered is a screening of Rockmore’s documentary. It includes a 2006 interview with Ray Solomonoff, one of the original attendees.
“I think McCarthy thought we would all work together and get something really going by the end of the conference,” Solomonoff says—and then bursts out laughing at the absurdity of imagining AI as a reality. He clearly did not envision that less than two decades later, human beings would consult with AI therapists and fall in love with chatbots.
