The 1956 Dartmouth Workshop and its Immediate Consequences: The
Origins of Artificial Intelligence
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John McCarthy
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Thursday,
March 8, 6:00 p.m.
NASA Ames
Main Auditorium (Building 201),
Moffett Federal Airfield, Mountain View, CA, USA
Reception
to follow in
Museum's Visible Storage Exhibit Area (Building 126)
ABSTRACT OF TALK
In the summer of 1955, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester,
Claude Shannon and John McCarthy proposed a summer workshop on
artificial intelligence to be held at Dartmouth in the summer
of 1956. It was hoped that the workshop would bring in new ideas
and make substantial progress on the AI problem.
In a
proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation, the team used what was
apparently the first appearance of the phrase "artificial
intelligence."
They hoped
to prove "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 attempt will be made to find
how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts,
solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve
themselves."
BACKGROUND OF SPEAKER
John McCarthy, Hoover Institution Senior Fellow, received his B.S. in
mathematics from the California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D.
in mathematics from Princeton University. He has been Professor of
Computer Science at Stanford University since 1962, (becoming
Professor Emeritus in January 2001) and was also Charles M. Pigott
Professor in the School of Engineering. McCarthy was Director of the
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford from 1965 to 1980,
studying the types of information and modes of reasoning required
for intelligent behavior.
He
originated the LISP programming language for computing with symbolic
expressions, was one of the first to propose and design time-sharing
computer systems, and pioneered in using mathematical logic to prove
the correctness of computer programs.
McCarthy is
the recipient of the A.M. Turing Award of the Association for
Computing Machinery, the first Research Excellence Award of the
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the Kyoto
Prize, and the National Medal of Science. He is a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of
Engineering, and the National Academy of Sciences. McCarthy was made
a Computer Museum History Center Fellow in
1999. |
