The Birth and Evolution of Artificial Intelligence: From Dartmouth to Modern Systems

Abstract

In 1956, during a workshop in Dartmouth that John McCarthy had arranged, the phrase artificial intelligence was established. All present consented to use McCarthy's proposed term, "Artificial Intelligence," to describe the emerging discipline. There was a lot of excitement when it happened. It seems like everything went swimmingly. It felt like the age of really intelligent systems was finally here just a short time ago, when computers were seen as massive calculators. Amazing things were accomplished by early programs only by describing domain knowledge and looking for a solution. For instance, the 'Logic Theorist' by Newell and Simon proved certain qualitative mathematical theorems, and they even discovered a way to prove one of the theorems in Russell and Whitehead's 'Principia Mathematica' in less time. To apply the same paradigm to commonsense thinking, McCarthy proposed in 1958 that we utilize it to express information about the daily.