The Birthplace of AI

Prior to the conference, Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth John McCarthy and Claude Shannon from MIT had been co-editing the then forthcoming Volume 34 of the Annals of Mathematics Studies journal, on Automata Studies (Shannon & McCarthy, 1956). Automata are self-operating machines designed to automatically follow predetermined sequences of operations or respond to predetermined instructions. As engineering mechanisms they appear in a wide variety of everyday applications such as mechanical clocks where a hammer strikes a bell or a cuckoo appears to sing. "At the time I believed if only we could get everyone who was interested in the subject together to devote time to it and avoid distractions, we could make real progress" -- John McCarthy The initial group McCarthy had in mind included Marvin Minsky whom he had known since they were graduate students together at Fine Hall in the early 1950s. The two had talked about artificial intelligence then, and Minsky's PhD dissertation in mathematics had been on neural nets (Moor, 2006) and the structure of the human brain (Nasar, 1998).