The Dartmouth Conference, 1956: The Summer AI Was Born

The Dartmouth Conference, 1956: The Summer AI Was Born Hanover, New Hampshire — A Setting for History Imagine it: Summer, 1956. The Dartmouth College campus, nestled in the tranquil Connecticut River Valley, quietly hums with the energy of ideas. Brick and white wood buildings radiate an old-school confidence—a sense that big thinking is not just encouraged, but expected. That summer, ten young researchers gathered in one of those buildings. They were mathematicians, psychologists, computer scientists, and engineers. Most were still in their twenties or thirties, just starting out, but they would go on to shape a whole new discipline. They debated fiercely, collaborated, sometimes talked past one another. They didn't crack the code of artificial intelligence right then and there. They didn’t invent the AI we know today. But they did something bigger: they gave the quest for machine intelligence a name. And that name, "artificial intelligence," became the rallying point for decades of i