---
title: "History of computer science"
chunk: 5/5
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:59:29.311655+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The term artificial intelligence was credited by John McCarthy to explain the research that they were doing for a proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research. The naming of artificial intelligence also led to the birth of a new field in computer science. On August 31, 1955, a research project was proposed consisting of John McCarthy, Marvin L. Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude E. Shannon. The official project began in 1956 that consisted of several significant parts they felt would help them better understand artificial intelligence's makeup.
McCarthy and his colleagues' ideas behind automatic computers was while a machine is capable of completing a task, then the same should be confirmed with a computer by compiling a program to perform the desired results. They also discovered that the human brain was too complex to replicate, not by the machine itself but by the program. The knowledge to produce a program that sophisticated was not there yet.
The concept behind this was looking at how humans understand our own language and structure of how we form sentences, giving different meaning and rule sets and comparing them to a machine process. The way computers can understand is at a hardware level. This language is written in binary (1s and 0's). This has to be written in a specific format that gives the computer the ruleset to run a particular hardware piece.
Minsky's process determined how these artificial neural networks could be arranged to have similar qualities to the human brain. However, he could only produce partial results and needed to further the research into this idea.
McCarthy and Shannon's idea behind this theory was to develop a way to use complex problems to determine and measure the machine's efficiency through mathematical theory and computations. However, they were only to receive partial test results.
The idea behind self-improvement is how a machine would use self-modifying code to make itself smarter. This would allow for a machine to grow in intelligence and increase calculation speeds. The group believed they could study this if a machine could improve upon the process of completing a task in the abstractions part of their research.
The group thought that research in this category could be broken down into smaller groups. This would consist of sensory and other forms of information about artificial intelligence. Abstractions in computer science can refer to mathematics and programming language.
Their idea of computational creativity is how the program or a machine can be seen in having similar ways of human thinking. They wanted to see if a machine could take a piece of incomplete information and improve upon it to fill in the missing details as the human mind can do. If this machine could do this; they needed to think of how did the machine determine the outcome.

== See also ==
Computer museum
List of computer term etymologies, the origins of computer science words
List of pioneers in computer science
History of computing
History of computing hardware
History of software
History of personal computers
Timeline of algorithms
Timeline of women in computing
Timeline of computing 2020–present

== References ==

=== Sources ===
Evans, Claire L. (2018). Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet. New York: Portfolio/Penguin. ISBN 9780735211759.
Grier, David Alan (2013). When Computers Were Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9781400849369 – via Project MUSE.

== Further reading ==
Tedre, Matti (2014). The Science of Computing: Shaping a Discipline. Taylor and Francis / CRC Press. ISBN 978-1-4822-1769-8.
Kak, Subhash : Computing Science in Ancient India; Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd (2001)
The Development of Computer Science: A Sociocultural Perspective Matti Tedre's Ph.D. Thesis, University of Joensuu (2006)
Ceruzzi, Paul E. (1998). A History of a Modern Computing. The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-03255-1.
Copeland, B. Jack. "The Modern History of Computing". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ISSN 1095-5054. OCLC 429049174.

== External links ==

Computer History Museum
Computers: From the Past to the Present
The First "Computer Bug" at the Naval History and Heritage Command Photo Archives.
Bitsavers, an effort to capture, salvage, and archive historical computer software and manuals from minicomputers and mainframes of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s
Oral history interviews