A Dartmouth professor named John McCarthy had urged the wider academic community to explore an area of research he called29 “automata studies,” but that didn’t mean much to anyone else. So he recast it as “artificial intelligence,” and that summer, he organized a conference along-side several like-minded academics and other researchers. The agenda at the Dartmouth Summer Research Conference on Artificial Intelligence included30 “neuron nets,” but also “automatic computers,” “abstractions,” and “self-improvement.” Those who attended the conference would lead the movement into the 1960s, most
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