This is an attempt to analyze attitudes and arguments brought forth by questions like "Can machines think?" and "Can machines exhibit intelligence?" Its purpose is to improve the climate which surrounds research in the field of machine or artificial intelligence. Its goal is not to convince those who answer the above questions negatively that they are wrong (although an attempt will be made to refute some of the negative arguments) but that they should be tolerant of research investigating these questions. The negative attitudes existent today tend to inhibit such research.Reprinted in Feigenbaum & Feldman, Computers and Thought (1963).Also in Datamation 9(3), March 1963, pp.34-38.Symposium on Bionics, Rand Technical Report 60 600, pp. 13-19

Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery, Vol 7, pp. 102-128

This is the first clear call for the separation of knowledge and inference procedure in AI. In this paper McCarthy advocates using predicate logic as a declarative representation of knowledge and first-order logic as the inference procedure.Additional notes on this landmark paper at http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/mcc59/mcc59.html.Bar-Hilel's comments in the discussion section from the conference are also interesting:"PROF. Y. BAR-HILLEL: Dr. McCarthy's paper belongs in the Journal of Half-Baked Ideas, the creation of which was recently proposed by Dr. I. J. Good. Dr. McCarthy will probably be the first to admit this. Before he goes on to bake his ideas fully, it might be well to give him some advice and raise some objections. He himself mentions some possible objections, but I do not think that he treats them with the full consideration they deserve; there are others he does not mention.For lack of time, I shall not go into the first part of his paper, although I think that it contains a lot of highly unclear philosophical, or pseudo-philosophical assumptions. I shall rather spend my time in commenting on the example he works out in his paper at some length. Before I start, let me voice my protest against the general assumption of Dr. McCarthy -- slightly caricatured -- that a machine, if only its program is specified with a sufficient degree of carelessness, will be able to carry out satisfactory even rather difficult tasks."In Proceedings of the Symposium on the Mechanization of Thought Processes, National Physical Laboratory 1:77-84

'The modern science of switching theory began

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TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR the two volumes of papers and discussions of papers from the 1959 conference held at the National Physical Laboratory, sometimes known as "The Teddington Conference". Officially these two volumes are the Proceedings of the Symposium on Mechanisation of Thought Processes. Many of the classics are downloadable separately, the remainder are available from the longer downloads of the complete volumes:Vol 1 = http://aitopics.org/sites/default/files/classic/TeddingtonConference/Mechanisation of Thought Processes Vol. 1.pdfVol. 2 = http://aitopics.org/sites/default/files/classic/TeddingtonConference/Mechanisation of Thought Processes Vol. 2.pdfTeddington Conference

From: Technology Review, November, 62:42-45. See also: Some studies in machine learning using the game of checkers, IBM Journal of Research and Development, 3(3) :210-229, 1959.

This paper briefly reviews the evidence for multistore theories of memory and points out some difficulties with the approach. An alternative framework for human memory research is then outlined in terms of depth or levels of processing. Some current data and arguments are reexamined in the light of this alternative framework and implications for further research considered.

Group Report 54-15, Lincoln Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lexington, Mass

Teddington Conference