John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon proposed a research gathering at Dartmouth. They asked whether aspects of learning and intelligence could be described precisely enough for a machine to simulate them.
Why it mattered: a broad question became a shared research program. The proposal was written in 1955; the summer project followed in 1956.
The perspective: today’s assistants grew from a much longer history of ideas, experiments, setbacks, and renewed progress.