As a child Ray Solomonoff developed what would become a lifelong passion for mathematical theorems, and as a teenager he became captivated with the idea of creating machines that could learn and ultimately think.

In 1952 he met Marvin Minsky, a cognitive scientist who was also exploring the idea of machine learning, and John McCarthy, a young mathematician. And within four years, they and seven other scientists, as part of the original Dartmouth Summer Research Project, had founded a new field and given it a name: artificial intelligence.

The conference proved to be a watershed both for the field of artificial intelligence (Dr. McCarthy, a Dartmouth College mathematician at the time, coined the term) and for modern computing. It laid out a proposal for a program of study, stating, “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 next summer Allen Newell, J.C. Shaw and Herbert Simon, researchers at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), devised a program to discover proofs of logical theorems. Simulated by hand in 1955, the program, called “Logic Theorist,” was demonstrated at the Dartmouth conference and is considered to be the first effort to create an artificial intelligence program.