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Chapter 1 · References

References: The Dream of Thinking Machines

References

Use primary historical sources to separate what the original authors claimed from the simplified stories repeated in later AI histories.

Direct Primary Sources

  • George Boole, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854): Project Gutenberg edition.
  • Ada Lovelace, notes on Menabrea's sketch of the Analytical Engine (1843): transcribed historical text.
  • Alan Turing, "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" (1936): DOI.
  • Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950): DOI.
  • McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester, and Shannon, Dartmouth proposal (1955): Dartmouth archive and context.
  • Science Museum, Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2: Technical Description: technical history.

Read Turing's 1936 paper for computability and limits, the 1950 paper for the imitation-game argument, and the Dartmouth proposal for the ambitions researchers actually recorded. The chapter's historical narrative is an interpretation built around those sources, not a claim that AI began at one event.

Primary References

Books and Historical Sources

  • George Boole — An Investigation of the Laws of Thought
  • Charles Babbage — Passages from the Life of a Philosopher
  • Ada Lovelace — Notes on Luigi Menabrea's sketch of the Analytical Engine
  • Martin Davis — The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing
  • Stuart Russell & Peter Norvig — Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach

Landmark Papers and Events

  • Alan Turing (1936) — On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem
  • Alan Turing (1950) — Computing Machinery and Intelligence
  • John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester & Claude Shannon (1955) — A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence
  • Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence (1956)

Historical Figures Covered

  • Aristotle
  • Blaise Pascal
  • Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
  • George Boole
  • Charles Babbage
  • Ada Lovelace
  • Alan Turing
  • John McCarthy
  • Marvin Minsky
  • Nathaniel Rochester
  • Claude Shannon

Concepts Covered

  • Formal reasoning
  • Boolean logic
  • Mechanical computation
  • Programmable machines
  • General-purpose computation
  • The Turing Test
  • The Dartmouth Conference
  • Artificial Intelligence as an engineering discipline

Related Chapters

  • Chapter 2 — What is Artificial Intelligence?
  • Chapter 3 — Types of Artificial Intelligence
  • Chapter 4 — AI Summers, AI Winters & the Rise of Modern AI

Modern Survey

References — The Dream of Thinking Machines | KnowledgeOS