#John McCarthy

He organised the Dartmouth Conference, coined the term artificial intelligence, invented LISP, and founded the Stanford AI Laboratory. For half a century he was the field's most important institution-builder and its most stubborn defender of symbolic reasoning. The complicated legacy of the man who gave AI its name and its mission.

The 1956 Dartmouth Conference in full narrative detail — who was in the room, what they argued about in the evenings, what they agreed on, what they were spectacularly wrong about, and how a single summer's conversation gave a field its name, its mission, and the overconfidence that would eventually send it into its first winter.