Dartmouth proposal
The 1955 proposal for a summer research project at Dartmouth that named the field 'artificial intelligence' and set out the aim of making machines simulate aspects of human intelligence.
The Dartmouth proposal is the 1955 document, "A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence", that put forward a summer workshop at Dartmouth College and gave the field its name. It proposed to study the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be described so precisely that a machine can be made to simulate it.
It is generally treated as the founding moment of artificial intelligence as a named research area.
Where it sits
Historically it follows Alan Turing's 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, and precedes Cahit Arf's 1959 question about thinking machines. Placing Arf in that sequence shows that the question of what thinking machines are, and where the threshold lies, was being asked in several places at once.
The goals set at Dartmouth are also a distant ancestor of today's debates about AGI.
Read more in Cahit Arf's 1959 question about thinking machines.
Related terms
Computing Machinery and Intelligence
Alan Turing's 1950 paper that asked whether machines can think and proposed testing it through an imitation game, now known as the Turing test.
Cahit Arf
Turkish mathematician (1910–1997) who published a 1959 lecture asking whether machines can think. He is known for the Arf invariant and Hasse–Arf theorem, and his adaptation threshold remains useful.
AGI
Artificial general intelligence: a hypothetical AI that matches human ability across a wide range of tasks. Definitions vary, which is why the practical question is which capability threshold changed a decision.