Dartmouth 1956: the field gets a name

On 31 August 1955 four researchers put their names to a funding proposal: John McCarthy of Dartmouth College, Marvin Minsky of Harvard, Nathaniel Rochester of IBM and Claude Shannon of Bell Telephone Laboratories. They asked the Rockefeller Foundation for $14,000 to bring a small group to Dartmouth for the summer. The foundation gave them about half.

The proposal used a phrase nobody had put on a research programme before: artificial intelligence. In the summer of 1956, for roughly eight weeks, about twenty scientists came and went in Hanover, New Hampshire, some for the whole summer, some for a day.