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Happy Birthday, AI—and Happy Birthday to You Too, Psychology

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yesterday

In the summer of 1956, “artificial intelligence” was coined.

During that same summer, the conception of cognitive science took place.

Historically, terminologically, and conceptually, psychology and AI are married.

June 18, 1956 was a memorable day. It was the day the term “artificial intelligence” was coined at the start of the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. That workshop lasted from that day in June until August 17. The workshop was ambitiously aimed so 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.”

Textbooks on artificial intelligence highlight the Dartmouth workshop as the start of artificial intelligence, but whether it actually started 70 years ago, or earlier with the Turing test in 1950, or with Ada Lovelace’s algorithms in 1840, is a matter of debate. In any case, textbooks highlight the impact artificial intelligence has had on computer science since the 1950s. This is no surprise; many of the attendees of the Dartmouth workshop were computer scientists interested in building thinking machines. What often gets forgotten is that many of the attendees (e.g., Marvin Minsky and Nathaniel Rochester) had a strong interest in psychology or had a position in psychology (e.g., Alan Newell and Herb Simon), or were psychologists invited for the workshop but unable to attend (e.g., George........

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