The field of artificial intelligence (AI) was officially established in 1956 during a workshop at Dartmouth College, organized by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon. This event is widely recognized as the birth of AI as a distinct discipline.
Prior to this, in 1950, British mathematician Alan Turing published a seminal paper titled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” in which he posed the question, “Can machines think?” He introduced what is now known as the Turing Test to determine a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior.
The earliest successful AI programs emerged in the early 1950s. In 1951, Christopher Strachey developed a checkers-playing program, and Dietrich Prinz wrote a chess-playing program. Both were implemented on the Ferranti Mark I computer at the University of Manchester.
These foundational efforts laid the groundwork for AI research, leading to the advanced systems we see today.