Dartmouth Conference — Artificial Intelligence Named as a Discipline

In the summer of 1956, a two-month workshop at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, formally established artificial intelligence as an academic discipline. Organized by John McCarthy, who coined the term "artificial intelligence," the conference brought together Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, and others who continued to shape the field's development. The proposal declared 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" — an assumption that drove both the field's progress and its first major collapse.