The Term Artificial Intelligence Is Coined

John McCarthy coined the term “artificial intelligence” in a proposal for a Dartmouth College study written with Marvin Minsky (Harvard University), Nathaniel Rochester (IBM) and Claude Shannon (Bell Telephone Laboratories). According to the proposal, “the study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” The proposal also included an early hypothesis on the connection between randomness, intuition and creativity: “A fairly attractive and yet clearly incomplete conjecture is that the difference between creative thinking and unimaginative competent thinking lies in the injection of some randomness. The randomness must be guided by intuition to be efficient. In other words, the educated guess or the hunch include controlled randomness in otherwise orderly thinking.” The workshop took place the following year and is considered the official beginning of the field.