Reflections on 1956

The Dartmouth College Artificial Intelligence Conference: The Next 50 Years (AI@50) took place July 13-15, 2006. The conference had three objectives: to celebrate the Dartmouth Summer Research Project, which occurred in 1956; to assess how far AI has progressed; and to project where AI is going or should be going. AI@50 was generously funded by the office of the Dean of Faculty and the office of the Provost at Dartmouth College, by DARPA, and by some private donors. Dating the beginning of any movement is difficult, but the Dartmouth Summer Research Project of 1956 is often taken as the event that initiated AI as a research discipline. John Mc-Carthy, a mathematics professor at Dartmouth at the time, had been disappointed that the papers in Automata Studies, which he coedited with Claude Shannon, did not say more about the possibilities of computers possessing intelligence.