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The Meeting of the Minds That Launched AI
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History of TechnologyTopicArtificial IntelligenceTypeGuest Article
The Meeting of the Minds That Launched AI
There's more to this group photo from a 1956 AI workshop than you'd
think
Grace Solomonoff
06 May 2023
6 min read
black and white photo of seven smiling men, sitting on a lawn in
front of a tree and a white school building with many windows.
At the 1956 Dartmouth AI workshop, the organizers and a few other
participants gathered in front of Dartmouth Hall.
The Minsky Family
history of aidartmouth ai workshopartificial intelligence
The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence,
held from 18 June through 17 August of 1956, is widely considered the
event that kicked off AI as a research discipline. Organized by John
McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, and Nathaniel Rochester, it
brought together a few dozen of the leading thinkers in AI, computer
science, and information theory to map out future paths for
investigation.
A group photo [shown above] captured seven of the main participants.
When the photo was reprinted in Eliza Strickland's October 2021
article "The Turbulent Past and Uncertain Future of Artificial
Intelligence" in IEEE Spectrum, the caption identified six people,
plus one "unknown." So who was this unknown person?
Who is in the photo?
Six of the people in the photo are easy to identify. In the back row,
from left to right, we see Oliver Selfridge, Nathaniel Rochester,
Marvin Minsky, and John McCarthy. Sitting in front on the left is Ray
Solomonoff, and on the right, Claude Shannon. All six contributed to
AI, computer science, or related fields in the decades following the
Dartmouth workshop.
Close up of a black and white photo of seven smiling men, sitting on
a lawn.In the back row from left to right are Oliver Selfridge,
Nathaniel Rochester, Marvin Minsky, and John McCarthy. In front on
the left is Ray Solomonoff; on the right, Claude Shannon. The
identity of the person between Solomonoff and Shannon remained a
mystery for some time.The Minsky Family
Between Solomonoff and Shannon is the unknown person. Over the years,
some people suggested that this was Trenchard More, another AI expert
who attended the workshop.
I first ran across the Dartmouth group photo in 2018, when I was
gathering material for Ray's memorial website. Ray and I had met in
1969, and we got married in 1989; he passed away in late 2009. Over
the years, I had attended a number of his talks, and I had met many
of Ray's peers and colleagues in AI, so I was curious about the
photo.
I thought, "Gee, that guy in the middle doesn't look like my memory
of Trenchard." So I called up Trenchard's son Paul More. He assured
me that the unknown person was not his father.
More recently, I discovered a letter among Ray's papers. On 8
November 1956, Nat Rochester sent a short note and a copy of the
photo to some colleagues: "Enclosed is a print of the photograph I
took of the Artificial Intelligence group." He sent his note to
McCarthy, Minsky, Selfridge, Shannon, Solomonoff--and Peter Milner.
A typed letter with the photograph of the six men, is addressed to
six names from Nathaniel Rochester.Several months after the workshop,
Nathaniel Rochester sent a copy of the photo, along with this note,
to six people.Grace Solomonoff
So the unknown person must be Milner! This makes perfect sense.
Milner was working on neuropsychology at McGill University, in
Montreal, although he had trained as an electrical engineer. He's not
generally lumped in with the other AI pioneers because his research
interests diverged from theirs. Even at Dartmouth, he felt he was in
over his head, as he wrote in his 1999 autobiography: "I was invited
to a meeting of computer scientists and information theorists at
Dartmouth College.... Most of the time I had no idea what they were
talking about."
In his fascinating autobiography, Milner writes about his work in
radar development during World War II, and his switch after the war
from nuclear-reactor design to psychology. His doctoral thesis in
1954, "Effects of Intracranial Stimulation on Rat Behaviour,"
examined the effects of electrical stimulation on certain rat
neurons, which became widely and enthusiastically known as "pleasure
centers."
This work led to one of Milner's most famous papers, "The Cell
Assembly: Mark II," in 1957. The paper describes how, when a neuron
in the brain fires, it excites similar connected neurons (especially
those already aroused by sensory input) and randomly excites other
cortical neurons. Cells may form assemblies and connect with other
assemblies. But the neurons don't seem to exhibit the same
snowballing behavior of atoms that leads to an exponential explosion.
How neurons might inhibit this effect were among his ideas that led
to new insights at the workshop.
Milner's work contributed to the early development of artificial
neural networks, and it's why he was included in the Dartmouth
meeting. There was considerable interest among AI researchers in
studying the brain and neurons in order to reproduce its functions
and intelligence.
But as Strickland notes in her October 2021 Spectrum article, a
division was already forming in AI research. One side focused on
replicating the brain, while the other was more interested in what
the mind might do to directly solve problems. Scientists interested
in this latter approach were also represented at Dartmouth and later
championed the rise of symbolic logic, using heuristic and
algorithmic processes, which I'll discuss in a bit.
Where Was the Photo Taken?
Rochester's photo from 1956 shows the left-hand side of Dartmouth
Hall in the background. In 2006 Dartmouth convened a conference,
AI@50, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the AI gathering and to
discuss AI's present and future. Trenchard More, the person most
often misidentified as the "unknown person" in Nat's photo, met with
the organizers, James Moor and Carey Heckman, as well as Wendy
Conquest, who was working on a movie about AI for the conference.
None of the AI@50 organizers knew exactly where the 1956 meeting had
taken place.
More led them across the lawn and to the left-hand side door of
Dartmouth Hall. He showed them the rooms that were used, which in
turn triggered an old memory. During the 1956 meeting, as More
recalled in a 2011 interview, "Selfridge, and Minsky, and McCarthy,
and Ray Solomonoff, and I gathered around a dictionary on a stand to
look up the word heuristic, because we thought that might be a useful
word." On that 2006 tour of Dartmouth Hall, he was delighted to find
that the dictionary was still there.
The word heuristic was invoked all through the summer of 1956.
Instead of trying to analyze the brain to develop machine
intelligence, some participants focused on the operational steps
needed to solve a given problem, making particular use of heuristic
methods to quickly identify the steps.
Early in the summer, for instance, Herb Simon and Allen Newell gave a
talk on a program they had written, the logic theory machine. The
program relied on early ideas of symbolic logic, with algorithmic
steps and heuristic guidance in list form. They later won the 1975
Turing Award for these ideas. Think of heuristics as intuitive
guides. The logic theory machine used such guides to initiate the
algorithmic steps--that is, the set of instructions to actually carry
out the problem solving.
Who Wasn't in the Photo
There was one person who was at the Dartmouth Workshop from time to
time but was never included in any of the lists of attendees: Gloria
Minsky, Marvin's wife.
But Gloria was definitely a presence that summer. Marvin, Ray, and
John McCarthy were the only three participants to stay for the entire
eight-week workshop. Everyone else came and went as their schedules
allowed. At the time, Gloria was a pediatrics fellow at Children's
Hospital in Boston, but whenever she could, she would drive up to
Dartmouth, stay in Marvin's apartment, and visit with whoever was at
the workshop.
Several years earlier, in the spring of 1952, Gloria had been doing
her residency in pathology at New York's Bellevue Hospital, when she
began dating Marvin. Marvin was a Ph.D. student at Princeton, as was
McCarthy, and the two were invited to Bell Labs for the summer to
work under Claude Shannon. In July, just four months after their
first meeting, Gloria and Marvin got married. Although Marvin was
working nonstop for Shannon, Shannon insisted he and Gloria take a
honeymoon in New Mexico.
A letter from John McCarthy to Ray Solomonoff on Dartmouth College
stationery.In March 1956, John McCarthy, one of the Dartmouth AI
workshop's organizers, invited Ray Solomonoff to the summer workshop
in Hanover, N.H.Grace Solomonoff
Four years later, McCarthy, Shannon, and Minsky, along with Nat
Rochester, organized the Dartmouth workshop. Gloria remembered a
conversation between her husband and Ray, in which Marvin expressed a
thought that later became one of his hallmarks: "You need to see
something in more than one way to understand it." In Minsky's 2007
book The Emotion Machine, he looked at how emotions, intuitions, and
feelings create different descriptions and provide different ways of
looking at things. He tended to favor symbolic logic and deductive
methods in AI, which he called "good old-fashioned AI."
Ray, meanwhile, was focused on probabilities--the likelihood of
something happening and predictions of how it might evolve. He later
developed algorithmic probability, an early version of algorithmic
information theory, in which each different description of something
leads with a probabilistic likelihood (some more likely, some less
likely) of a given outcome in the future. Probabilistic methods
eventually became the underpinnings of machine learning.
These days, as chatbots enter the limelight, and compression methods
are used more in AI, the value of understanding things in many ways
and using probabilistic predictions will only grow in importance.
That is, logic and probability methods are uniting. These in turn are
being aided by new work on neural nets as well as symbolic logic. And
so the photo that Nat Rochester took not only captured a moment in
time for AI. It also offered a glimpse into how AI would develop.
The author thanks Gloria Minsky, Margaret Minsky,Nicholas Rochester,
Julie Sussman, Gerald Jay Sussman, and Paul More for their help and
patience.
From Your Site Articles
* Marvin Minsky's Legacy of Students and Ideas >
* How Claude Shannon Helped Kick-start Machine Learning >
* The Turbulent Past and Uncertain Future of Artificial
Intelligence >
Related Articles Around the Web
* A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on
Artificial ... >
* Ray Solomonoff and the Dartmouth Summer Research Project in ... >
* Artificial Intelligence (AI) Coined at Dartmouth | Dartmouth >
history of aidartmouth ai workshopartificial intelligence
{"imageShortcodeIds":[]}
Grace Solomonoff
Grace Solomonoff is a researcher based in Arlington, Mass. She is
writing a book about the Dartmouth AI workshop.
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