The term “Artificial Intelligence” was coined in 1955 by John McCarthy in a Dartmouth proposal dated August 31, 1955, co-authored with Marvin L. Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude E. Shannon. The plan led to the 1956 summer project in Hanover, New Hampshire, now seen as the birth of AI.

Seventy-one years after it entered our vocabulary, the term “Artificial Intelligence” still carries the ambition first set down on paper in 1955. Computer scientist John McCarthy introduced the phrase that year in a proposal for a summer research project at Dartmouth College in the US.

Dated August 31, 1955, the Dartmouth Summer Research Project proposal named four authors: John McCarthy, Marvin L. Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude E. Shannon. What they outlined was modest in size but bold in scope: a two-month study with 10 people, to run at Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956.

The aim was to see whether machines could be made to simulate human intelligence. The proposal said the team would explore how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve problems then viewed as distinctly human, and improve themselves over time.

Their agenda was expansive for the period. It included automatic computers, programming computers to use language, neuron nets, self-improvement, abstractions, randomness and creativity.

Turing Asked the Question First in 1950

“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.”

That single sentence captured the project’s central idea and set the tone for what followed.

Earlier, in 1950, British mathematician Alan Turing published a paper titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". He opened with a pointed question: “Can machines think?”

Dartmouth 1956: AI’s Foundational Agenda

Turing sidestepped debates over definitions by proposing a practical test. In the game he described, a person would communicate with another person and a machine, sight unseen, and try to tell them apart. He called it the “Imitation Game”, an idea later known as the Turing Test. The shift was away from arguing about thought itself and toward whether a machine could imitate human behaviour convincingly.

By 1956, McCarthy had organised the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence in Hanover, New Hampshire. The gathering is widely regarded as the birth of AI as a research field. Rather than imagining chatbots writing emails or tools making videos, the group focused on whether machines could learn, reason and carry out tasks that appeared to require human intelligence.

Professor of Philosophy James Moor said the Hanover group was thinking about ways to make machines more cognizant and seeking a framework for better understanding human intelligence. The term “Artificial Intelligence”, coined in 1955, thus marked the start of a field whose questions remain central today.