No article about vintage AI is complete without mentioning the Dartmouth summer workshop of 1956, which is widely regarded as the event that kickstarted the entire field of AI research. Participants included people like John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Ray Solomonoff, Claude Shannon, and John Nash, among others. In retrospect, they might have slightly underestimated the nontriviality of the problems involved:
> 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.
> 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.