retroelectro
Retro Electro: Programming a calculator to form concepts: the birth of artificial intelligence
Figure 1. Some attendees of the Summer Research Project. Back row, from left to right, Oliver Selfridge, Nathaniel Rochester,
Marvin Minsky, and John McCarthy. In front, Ray
Solomonoff, Peter Milner, and Claude Shannon.
Written by: David Ray, Cyber City Circuits
The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can, in principle, be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.
study on artificial intelligence. The aim was to gather many of the nation’s top scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in the same room together to focus on what artificial intelligence could mean and how they could get there. They requested $13,500 to complete this study, but the Rockefeller Foundation only provided $7500 for a five-week study instead of two months. The group of four organizers were all highly distinguished researches and inventors. They were developing the fundamentals for today’s generative AI, nearly seventy years ago. The proposal outlines seven distinct parts of the problem.
an automatic calculator can be programmed to simulate the machine.” The idea was simple: if a machine could do a job, a computer could be
A proposal for The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on artificial intelligence
Since the earliest days of ‘computers’, it has taken thousands of people to bring ‘artificial intelligence’ and machine learning to where it is today. In the Summer of 1955, Dr. John McCarthy started a new position as an assistant professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth College. Historians say McCarthy was the first to use the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ in this proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation. Proposed and Organized by John McCarthy of Dartmouth College, Marvin Minsky of Harvard University, Nathaniel Rochester of IBM, and Claude E. Shannon of Bell Labs. The proposal was for a two-month, ten-man
Automatic computers
Figure 2. Personal invitation to Dartmouth from McCarthy to Ray Solomonoff.
“If a machine can do a job, then
we get technical
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