How did a 1956 summer workshop give "artificial intelligence" its name?

A 1956 summer workshop at Dartmouth College gave artificial intelligence its name. The name itself came a year earlier. In 1955, mathematician John McCarthy picked the words for a proposal he wrote with Claude Shannon, Marvin Minsky and Nathaniel Rochester. He chose them partly because they sounded neutral, unlike rival labels such as cybernetics.

The proposal was bold. It asked for ten people and two months. It bet that every feature of intelligence could, in principle, be described precisely enough for a machine to simulate it. And it promised a "significant advance" on language, abstraction, problem-solving or self-improving machines, if a carefully chosen group worked on it together for one summer.

The real workshop was looser than the plan. It ran for six to eight weeks on the top floor of Dartmouth's math department, with no fixed agenda. Only three people stayed the whole time: Ray Solomonoff, Marvin Minsky and McCarthy himself. Others, like Arthur Samuel, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, dropped in for days or weeks. On a typical day, three to eight people sat in the room.

Newell and Simon brought something concrete. At the workshop they debuted the Logic Theorist, a program that proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in a chapter of Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica. It even found a shorter proof for one of them. Newell traced the idea to a single afternoon in 1954, watching a talk on pattern matching. The name chosen to sound neutral stuck, and the field it named is still working on the goals of that one summer.