Artificial intelligence officially came into being as a scientific discipline in 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States, during a summer school organized by four researchers: John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon.
For the organizers of this summer school, artificial intelligence (or AI) initially sought to simulate on machines every faculty associated with intelligence, whether human, animal, plant or social. They believed that this scientific discipline rested on the conjecture that all cognitive functions—particularly learning, reasoning, computation, perception and memory, and even scientific discovery or artistic creativity—can be described precisely enough to be reproduced on computers. Despite the considerable progress made since then, the study of artificial intelligence has continued to rest on the same conjecture, which nothing to date has either disproved or conclusively proved.
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The four musketeers of AI
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Artificial intelligence as a scientific discipline did not emerge from nowhere. It followed in the footsteps of cybernetics, the science of complex systems and their control, which was founded in the 1940s and was particularly active in the early 1950s. Cybernetics sought to model the regulation of biological, psychological, political and social systems in terms of information flows. The artificial neural networks so widely used in artificial intelligence grew out of research into cybernetics. Marvin Minsky, one of the "four musketeers" behind artificial intelligence, wrote his thesis on learning in artificial neural networks. These are computational algorithms whose original design was inspired by the workings of biological neurons.
