A REPORT ON THE DARTMOUTH AI CONFERENCE- BY ASHIM DAS

      The Dartmouth AI conference gave birth to the field of AI, and gave new generations of scientists their first sense of the potential for information technology to be of benefit to human beings in a profound way. This conference was the largest gathering on the topic that had yet taken place, and laid the foundation for an ambitious vision that has affected research and development in engineering, math, computer science, psychology, and many other fields ever since. In 1956, John McCarthy invited many of the leading researchers of the time in a wide range of advanced research topics such as complexity theory, language simulation, neuron nets, abstraction of content from sensory inputs, relationship of randomness to creative thinking, and learning machines to Dartmouth in Vermont to discuss a subject so new to the human imagination that he had to coin a new term for it: Artificial Intelligent (AI).

I am going to describe who attended in that conference (1956), their contribution, and their works after the conference, and who are going to attend in the next Dartmouth conference (2006).

Who attended (1956) and who are still alive:
1)	J. McCarthy (alive).
2)	M. L. Minsky (alive)
3)	C. E. Shannon (not alive)
4)	N. Rochester (alive)
5)	Allen Newell (not alive)
6)	Herbert A. Simon (not alive)
7)	Ray Solomonoff
8)	Alex Bernstein

         J. McCarthy, who was born September 4, 1927 in Boston, Massachusetts, was really the main organizer of the Dartmouth conference.

    He is a professor of computer science at Sanford University. He has been interested in AI since 1948 and coined the term in 1955. His main AI research area has been the formalization of common sense knowledge. He invented the LISP programming language in 1958, developed the concept of time-sharing in the late fifties and early sixties, and has worked on proving that computer programs meet their specifications since the early sixties. He invented the circumscription method of non-monotonic reasoning in 1978.

His main research was formalized common sense knowledge and reasoning (1995).
McCarthy received the A.M. Turing award of the Association for computing machinery in 1971 and was elected president of the American Association for AI for 1983-84 and is a fellow of that organization.
He received the first research excellence award of the international joint conference on AI in 1985, the Kyoto prize of the inamori foundation in November 1988,and the national medal of science in 1990. He is a member of the American academy of science. He has received honorary degrees from Linkoping University in sweeden, the polytechnic university of Madried, Colby College, Trinity College, Dublin and Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

During the conference, he was assistant professor of Math at Dartmouth. He believed that they could make real progress if they were interested in the subject together to devote time to it and avoid distractions.
A dispute occurred over the conference name. The conference was officially called the Dartmouth Summer research project on AI. McCarthy hadn’t chosen accidentally to call the conference by that name. McCarthy was interested in Automata studies. The Shannon and McCarthy volume contains many significant papers and was a reference in automata studies. Thus in the proposal and again at the conference he argued strongly for the term AI to distinguish it from automata theory, but some of the original participant in the Dartmouth conference, who object to it.

    M. L. Minsky, who was junior fellow in Mathematics and Neurology. He has built a machine for simulation learning by nerve nets and has written a Princeton PhD thesis in mathematics entitled, “Neural nets and the brain model problem” which includes results in learning theory and the brain model problem” which includes results in learning theory and the theory of random neural nets.

McCarthy knew Minsky from their graduate class at Princeton. In 1952, they had both been hired to work for the summer with Shannon at bell Labs, and thus McCarthy knew that Shannon was interested in his ideas, and he too was invited to join in the proposal.

Minsky, who had come up to Dartmouth with a geometry theorem-proving program, an idea that had attracted Newell and Simon earlier, but which they’d abandoned because of the difficulties of representing diagrams in the computer. Minsky believed that Newell and Simon had the right idea. They had already implemented their list-processing language, their logic theorist really worked, and they were well on their way to getting their first version of the general problem solver to work. Minsky agreed that for most people, there’s a large difference between an idea on paper and a schema that is implemented and really works.

After the Dartmouth conference Minsky got a clear idea for research. He put a lot effort into the precursor papers to “Steps toward AI” and also into kinds of mathematics that he hoped would be to AI, such as recursive function theory, theories of formal languages.

         C. E. Shannon (1916-2001), Who was a graduate of the University of Michigan, being awarded a degree in mathematics and electrical engineering in 1936. He is one of the originators of the Dartmouth conference. Although he had not been outstanding in mathematics, he then went to the Massachusetts institute of technology where he obtained a Master’s Degree in electrical engineering and his PhD in mathematics in 1940. Shannon wrote a master’s these A symbolic Analysis of Relay and switching Circuits on the use of Boole’s algebra and optimize relay switching circuits. His doctoral thesis was on population genetics, and he published mathematical theory of the differential analyzer in 1941.

Shannon joined AT & T Bell Telephones in New Jersey in 1941 as a research mathematician and remained at the Bell Laboratories until 1972.

In 1953, Minsky and McCarthy came to work for Shannon during the summer at Bell labs. So he got chance to edit the automata book with McCarthy and to join with McCarthy and Minsky and Rochester in sponsoring the Dartmouth conference. During Dartmouth conference Shannon planned to apply information theory concepts to brain models and to study the synthesis of brain models by developing a parallel series of matches and gradually more complicated environments and brain models that would adapt to those environments. But after the Dartmouth conference his interest went on a new direction .He resumed his work with information theory, and played about with ideas of a minimum universal Turing machine. Shannon had built a chess-playing machine too, a real-life special-purpose machine (unlike the other machines, which are in fact programs, intended to adapt the behavior of general-purpose computers to the task of playing chess). It was called Caissac, after Caissa, the muse of chess, and it played a variety of endgames, computing the advantages of various moves, flashing a light in the square of the move it wished to make. But these machines, this approach, proved to be unextendable, which may be one of the reasons Shannon, ended his flirtation with AI and contented him with being only an interested spectator.

Shannon received many honors for his work. Among a long list of awards were the Alfred Nobel American Institute of American Engineers Award in 1940, the national Medal of Science in 1966,the Audio Engineering Society Gold Medal in 1985, and the Kyoto prize in 1985. He was awarded the Marconi Lifetime Achievement award by the Guglielmo Marconi international fellowship foundation in 2000. It was the first time that organization, known for its annual Fellowship prize, gave this particular award.

Alzheimer’s disease afflicted him, and he spent his last few years in a Nursing home.

      N. Rochester, Manager of information of research, IBM Corporation, NY. He was concerned with the development of radar for seven years and computing machinery for seven years. He and another engineer were jointly responsible for the design of the IBM type 701, which is a scale automatic computer in wide use today.

         
    N. Rochester brought the question in the Dartmouth conference,” How can he make a machine that will exhibit originality in the solution of its problems?” And McCarthy give a solution like that “if we construct an artificial language which a computer can be programmed to use on problems requiring conjecture and self-reference. It should correspond to English in the sense that short English statements about the given subject matter should have short correspondents in the language and so should short arguments.

N. Rochester worked out some of the automatic programming techniques, which are in wide use today, and been concerned with problems of how to get machines to do tasks which previously could be done by people .He has also worked on simulation of nerve nets with particular emphasis on using computers to test theories in neurophysiology.

      Allen Newell (1927-1992) who was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the Rand Corporation and at Carnegie-melon’s school of computer science.
Allen was a graduate student at Princeton in the year of 1949 to 1950 when he studied mathematics. Due to a new field known as game theory and the experience from the study of mathematics, he was convinced that he would prefer a combination of experimental and theoretical research to pure mathematics. Soon after, he left Princeton and joined the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica where he worked for “a group that was studying logistics problems of the AIR Force.

He contributed to the Information processing Language in 1956 and two of the earliest programs, the logic theory machine (1956) and the general problem solver (1957) (with Herbert Simon).

Newell and Simon were satisfied with their works in the Dartmouth conference. They presented their work in its particulars, which appeared as a paper in the transactions of the conference, the first widely published announced of the Logic theorist (Newell and Simon, 1956). Newell’s work in Logistics sent him to take a look at some thing in the Pentagon called the Munitions Board, actually then responsible for logistics in the Department of Defense.

In 1957, Newell, Shaw, and Simon demonstrated the General problem solver. Newell said that he was a problem solver, and he wanted problems we could go out and solve. He simply couldn’t understand what motivated pure mathematics to go on working, looking at the structure of some mathematics logic.

The following are his works after the Dartmouth conference 1956.

!) “Production systems: Models of control structures.” In Visual Information Processing, W.C. Chase, Ed. New York: Academic press. (1973a)

2)” Artificial intelligent and the concept of mind”. In computer Models of Thought and Language, R. Schank and K.M. Colby, Eds, San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company. (1973b)

3) Speech Understanding systems: Final Report of a study Group, New York; (1973c).

4) “The knowledge level “. AI Magazine, Summer. (1981)

5) Unified Theories of cognition, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard university Press. (1990)

6) “Desires and Diversions”. Distinguished Lecture, school of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, (1991).

     Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001), who was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on           June 15,1916, and was the Nobel Prize Winner in Economic Science. In addition, he received honorary degrees from two dozens universities around the world, as well as the top awards from APS, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological foundation, the Association for computing Machinery, the American Economic Association, the American society of public Administration, the American political science society, the operations Research of America, and the institute of Management science.

Simon came to RAND as a consultant in the summer of 1952, two years after Allen Newell’s arrival. He was already well establishing as a political scientist and an economist, and a few years earlier had moved into a new field, examining human behavior in organizations. In 1947 he had published Administrative Behavior, a seminal book that went into a second edition kin 1957, and a third in 1976, and has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, and Swedish.

Simon was an important individual who gave the plan at the Dartmouth conference (1956). He brought the idea of the Logic Theorist with Newell. Minsky Mentioned one work of Newell and Simon at Dartmouth (1956) but named his own major influences as Shannon, Solomonoff, and Selfridges (Minsky, 1956). A later version of the same paper (Minsky, 1959) now at least cites the papers of Newell, Shaw, and Simon, but seems to regard their logic Theorist and their general problem solver as no more than instance of program that worked, or Samuel’s checker program worked, but not at all as models to be extended and generalized to other tasks or even as a general theory of intelligent behavior. Indeed, Minsky seems not to have come round to this view until 1961, when resigned that his hardy perennial of a paper was going to transform itself into a book, he added a large section to it that acknowledge the work of Newell and Simon as a major method of accomplished the work of Newell and Simon as a major method of accomplished the work of Newell and Simon as a major method of accomplished artificial intelligence, named it all” Steps toward Artificial intelligence”.

      Ray Solomonoff, who worked on model of inductive inference, trying to convince people that they did not have to give the machine hard problems to determine whether it was really thinking. Without a firm notion of what thinking really was, some had felt the only way to show that a machine was doing it was to give it problems that they themselves would have trouble solving. Solomonoff felt, to the contrary, that if he himself were working on a hard problem, he would have some idea about a simple problem offered to a simple problem offered to a machine allowed you to a machine allowed you to concentrate on the methods by which the machine solved the problem, and not on the solution itself.

    Alex Bernstein, who came from New York to talk about the chess-playing program when he played a game of chess with McCarthy the equivalent of mano in the world of science Bernstein won, despite the fact that he’d accepted the handicap of playing blindfold.

After that he produced a program to beat McCarthy when he got back to New York. Because he realized that his visit to Dartmouth didn’t coincide with that of Newell and Simon, he discovered only later that he and they had arrived independently at some of the same ideas for the problem.

The Dartmouth AI conference (2006):

After a long period of time The Dartmouth AI conference (2006) will be held at the same place to give the AI area new life. This conference would be very important because we got a lot of advancement after the first Dartmouth conference. But we lost some important lives like Herbert A. Simon, C.E. Shannon, Allen Newell who were the founder of the First Dartmouth conference, and who gave the actual life of AI. I think some of the new participants will bring their idea in the coming conference.

Between the two Dartmouth conference we got some AI conference that explore the AI in new way:

AI 2002: Canadian conference on AI, The 15th Canadian conference on AI.

AI 2003: The 16th Canadian conference on AI.

AI 2004: The 17th Canadian conference on AI.
AI 2005: is the leading Australia conference that focuses on all aspects of AI.

     

       The first Dartmouth AI conference (1956) was one of first serious attempts to consider the consequences of the exponential curve. Many participants came away from the discussions convinced that continued progress in electronic speed, capacity, and software programming would lead to the point where computers would someday have the resources to be as intelligent as human beings, the only real question was when and how it would happen.
But the Dartmouth AI conference (2006) will not be considered in the same way. Because after the fist conference  (1956) McCarthy invented LISP, Gelernter and N. Rochester produce a geometry theorem prover with a semantic component, Lotfi Zadeh invented fuzzy Logic (1965), R. Quillian’s PhD dissertation demonstrated the power of semantics nets. In 1967 DENDRAL was the first successful knowledge-based program for scientific reasoning, MACSYMA was the first successful knowledge-based program in mathematics, T. Shortliffe’s MYCIN (1974) was the first expert system program, Newell created SOAR (1982)- an architecture for general intelligence; R. Brooks demonstrated “Allen” the first of his autonomous reactive robots, to be followed by an explosion of this species; in 1997 Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov, the world’s chess champion; in 2000 Robot  pets, smart toys, became commercially available; C. Breazeal creates Kismet, a robot that exhibits emotions; in 2003 DARPA initiated 3 major AI projects: the “Life Log”, new reasoning cognitive system, and new real-world reasoning system.

I think our professor Dr. Kopec will attend the Dartmouth conference with his chess program. It would be great pleasure for us, because professor has been working on chess for long time, and his works Artificial Intelligent, Computer Chess, Knowledge and Search released on 5/9/2005.

References:

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Shannon.html

"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Newell

http://nobelprize.org/economics/laureates/1978/simon-autobio.html

“Machines who think” -by Pamela McCorduck.

http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/bios/mccarthy.html