As fun as it is to learn about the latest updates in the world of AI, I also find it very interesting to learn about the history of this field. One fascinating project was the “Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence”.

This was a research project done in 1955 by four luminaries of the field: John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon and Nick Rochester. Reading the proposal, there are two things that stand out to me:

1. The research project’s scope was visionary in its outlook. Covering everything from programming languages, neural networks, machine learning, algorithms and computational complexity, it set the stage for the direction of computer science and artificial intelligence for the next seven decades.
2. The sheer audacity of their plan: “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.” It took more than 70 years to realize the fruits of neural networks.

The proposal is a short paper and I would definitely recommend reading it to get an insight into the minds of the pioneers of the field at the time of this field’s infancy.