[HN Gopher] A Proposal for the Dartmouth Research Project on Art...
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       A Proposal for the Dartmouth Research Project on Artificial
       Intelligence (1955)
        
       Author : benbreen
       Score  : 31 points
       Date   : 2021-08-14 06:29 UTC (16 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www-formal.stanford.edu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www-formal.stanford.edu)
        
       | pomian wrote:
       | Reading the list of attendees to the conference, is an
       | interesting glimpse into computing history.
        
       | ghaff wrote:
       | To me, an interesting bit of trivia is that Cognitive Science had
       | its own introductory moment just a few months later at MIT with
       | some overlapping attendance. This is particularly of note if you
       | aren't of the school of thought that AI ~ ML. But cognitive
       | science hasn't had its own equivalent period of rapid advance.
       | 
       | http://mechanism.ucsd.edu/~bill/teaching/w07/philpsych/becht...
        
       | TMWNN wrote:
       | Did this lead to DTSS
       | (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_Time_Sharing_System>)
       | (and, thus, BASIC)?
        
         | ghaff wrote:
         | Short answer is probably not really. McCarthy was at Dartmouth
         | _very_ briefly which happened to overlap this conference. He
         | moved on to MIT and then Stanford.
         | 
         | John Kemeny was recently in Dartmouth's math department at the
         | time but AFAIK there was very little interaction with the early
         | AI work.
        
       | andyxor wrote:
       | > 3. how can a set of (hypothetical) neurons be arranged so as to
       | form concepts.
       | 
       | > 6. machine methods of forming abstractions from sensory and
       | other data.
       | 
       | Still unsolved after 66 years, the problem indeed "needs more
       | theoretical work".
       | 
       | Working on these at the same time with designing computer and
       | compiler (1 & 2) probably was a big distraction.
       | 
       | Another distraction is introducing 5 & 7 ("self-improvement" and
       | "randomness & creativity") before answering more fundamental
       | questions of knowledge representation (3 & 6).
       | 
       | Kind of like building algorithms before figuring out the details
       | of data structures.
        
         | varjag wrote:
         | I feel the context has to be emphasized here. FORTRAN won't
         | appear until a year later and LISP for all three. It was no
         | distraction: it was so early that much of CS and computing
         | history branches out from that event.
        
           | andyxor wrote:
           | yes, that project was so influential in developing computer
           | science, it determined almost all subsequent AI efforts from
           | symbolic AI to the recent revival of ANNs.
           | 
           | Those influential 1950s seminars contributed to the current
           | treatment of AI as a subset of CS instead of independent
           | discipline with roots in cognition and neuroscience research.
           | 
           | but with all due respect you can't really talk about
           | artificial intelligence before understanding intelligence
        
       | taoothereporter wrote:
       | Page not found
        
       | DonaldFisk wrote:
       | I get "Page not found".
       | 
       | Archived copy:
       | https://web.archive.org/web/20210520010546/https://www-forma...
        
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       (page generated 2021-08-14 23:00 UTC)