The proposal that named the field, signed in 1955 by McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester, and Shannon, opens by requesting that “a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.” The problems it listed - language, abstraction, problem solving, self-improvement - remain open research areas seventy years later.
The Dartmouth proposal estimated AI as a two-month, ten-man study
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Last verified June 6, 2026