The Dartmouth Conference

The Dartmouth Conference, held in 1956, is considered the birthplace of artificial intelligence (AI) as a field of study. Organized by researchers John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathan Rochester, and Claude Shannon, it brought together scientists interested in making machines that could simulate human intelligence. The conference proposed 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." This event sparked decades of research, leading to the development of intelligent systems that can learn, reason, and solve problems.