A proposal laid out the terms for the now famous 'summer workshop' of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, at which invited mathematicians and scientists were 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'.

An attempt, said the proposal, would be made to 'find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves'.