The National Physical Laboratory's Mechanisation of Thought Processes

The UK's answer to the 1956 Dartmouth AI conference, this symposium continued the budding field's momentum and mostly open-minded spirit, as one of the first international meetings on artificial intelligence after Dartmouth.

As for the event itself, it took place in November 1958 at Britain's National Physical Laboratory in Teddington. The conference took place over four days and its theme was the Mechanisation of Thought Processes. Her Majesty's Stationery Office would go on to publish its proceedings in two 1959 volumes.

John McCarthy presented “Programs with Common Sense,” proposing a program that would reason from stated facts, and Oliver Selfridge presented Pandemonium, a model of pattern recognition by competing units, mentioned previously on this timeline. It was a veritable all-star lineup with Marvin Minsky, Grace Hopper, Donald MacKay and Albert Uttley all speaking.

The late-50s weren't entirely free as it was still a bit political who even got invited to these conferences with certain regrettable omissions, chiefly Rosenblatt. However, these were still mostly drama-free days in AI research. But drama would plague the field in ten years' time with Minsky's Perceptrons book all but splitting the field ideologically into connectionist and symbolic camps.