The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, commonly known as the Dartmouth workshop, was a roughly two-month gathering held at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, during the summer of 1956. It is widely regarded as the founding event of Artificial intelligence as a named academic field.
The proposal
The workshop originated from a 1955 funding proposal written by John McCarthy, then a young mathematics professor at Dartmouth, together with Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, and Nathaniel Rochester of IBM. Submitted to the Rockefeller Foundation, the proposal requested funding for a study of artificial intelligence, the first documented use of that exact phrase, and stated the organizers' conjecture 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. The Rockefeller Foundation approved a more modest grant than requested, and the workshop convened in June 1956.
Participants and topics
Attendance varied over the summer rather than being a fixed group present throughout, with participants including McCarthy, Minsky, Shannon, Rochester, Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, Arthur Samuel, and several other researchers who would go on to shape the field. Newell and Simon arrived with an early demonstration of Logic Theorist, a program capable of proving mathematical theorems, which some historians consider the first working AI program and a highlight of the gathering. Discussion topics spanned neural networks, theories of computation, language processing, problem-solving, and what participants called self-improvement, early language for what would later be discussed as Machine learning.
Outcome and legacy
The workshop did not produce a single unifying theory or technical breakthrough, and participants later recalled it as more diffuse and less conclusive than the ambitious proposal had promised. Its lasting significance was institutional and rhetorical: it coined the field's name, gathered many of its founding figures in one place, and set research directions, symbolic reasoning, search, and machine learning, that dominated AI for the following decades. The event is conventionally cited as the starting point of AI history, the reference point against which subsequent AI winters and revivals, including the deep learning era beginning with the 2012 ImageNet moment, are measured.