Dartmouth AI Launch Photo

 Heard of this long ago,  and met a few of the participants.  Was inspired by some.   Notably Minsky. How would they react to progress now? Picture and more at the link.

The Meeting of the Minds That Launched AI There's more to this group photo from a 1956 AI workshop than you'd think     By  GRACE SOLOMONOFF  in Spectrum IEEE 

The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, held from 18 June through 17 August of 1956, is widely considered the event that kicked off AI as a research discipline. Organized by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, and Nathaniel Rochester, it brought together a few dozen of the leading thinkers in AI, computer science, and information theory to map out future paths for investigation.

A group photo [shown above] captured seven of the main participants. When the photo was reprinted in Eliza Strickland’s October 2021 article “The Turbulent Past and Uncertain Future of Artificial Intelligence,” in IEEE Spectrum, the caption identified six people, plus one “unknown.” So who was this unknown person?

Who is in the photo?

Six of the people in the photo are easy to identify. In the back row, from left to right, we see Oliver Selfridge, Nathaniel Rochester, Marvin Minsky, and John McCarthy. Sitting in front on the left is Ray Solomonoff, and on the right, Claude Shannon. All six contributed to AI, computer science, or related fields in the decades following the Dartmouth workshop.

Close up of a black and white photo of seven smiling men, sitting on a lawn.In the back row from left to right are Oliver Selfridge, Nathaniel Rochester, Marvin Minsky, and John McCarthy. In front on the left is Ray Solomonoff; on the right, Claude Shannon. The identity of the person between Solomonoff and Shannon remained a mystery for some time.  ... 

Between Solomonoff and Shannon is the unknown person. Over the years, some people suggested that this was Trenchard More, another AI expert who attended the workshop.

I first ran across the Dartmouth group photo in 2018, when I was gathering material for Ray’s memorial website. Ray and I had met in 1969, and we got married in 1989; he passed away in late 2009. Over the years, I had attended a number of his talks, and I had met many of Ray’s peers and colleagues in AI, so I was curious about the photo.  ... '