 The Turing test was proposed by British mathematician Alan Turing in his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence , which opens with the words : " I propose to consider the question , ' Can machines think ? ' " The term ' Artificial Intelligence ' was created at a conference held at Dartmouth College in 1956 . Allen Newell , J. C. Shaw , and Herbert A. Simon pioneered the newly created artificial intelligence field with the Logic Theory Machine ( 1956 ) , and the General <unk> <unk> in 1957 . In 1958 , John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky started the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab with $ 50 @,@ 000 . John McCarthy also created <unk> in the summer of 1958 , a programming language still important in artificial intelligence research . 
