AI: It's OK Again!

In 1956, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon organized the Dartmouth Summer Research Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 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. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer. Fifty-one years later, if we go by Jonathan Schaeffer and his team of researchers at the University of Alberta (www.cs.ualberta.ca/ It took more than a summer, but significant advances have been made on all of the targeted problems.