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International Congress "Les machines à calculer et la pensée humaine" — CNRS, Paris

1951 AD · Transmission: Silenced
ComputingAIEventFrench

From 8 to 13 January 1951, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) organized in Paris the congress "Les machines à calculer et la pensée humaine" ("Calculating machines and human thinking"), with 268 attendees from 10 countries and 35 papers, published in 1953 in a 589-page volume, only in French — the reason the congress has been historically eclipsed by the Dartmouth Workshop (1956), even though several current historians (Herbert Bruderer, among others) consider it a genuine candidate for the title of first artificial intelligence conference in history. Among the attendees were Norbert Wiener and Warren McCulloch. Gonzalo Torres Quevedo formally presented a paper on his father's devices ("Présentation des appareils de Leonardo Torres-Quevedo", pp. 383-406 of the proceedings) and gave a public demonstration of the Ajedrecista. During the congress, Norbert Wiener played a game against the automaton and lost — an encounter photographed and documented by multiple independent sources. Wiener, who in his book Cybernetics (1948) had already speculated abstractly about the possibility of building a chess machine without knowing of Torres Quevedo's work, later incorporated reflections on the Spanish automaton into his subsequent popular writings on cybernetics.

InstitutionCentre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
Historical regionFrance
Primary sourcePérès, J. (ed.) — Les machines à calculer et la pensée humaine, Colloques internationaux du CNRS, No. 37, Paris, 1953 (congress proceedings, including Torres-Quevedo, G. — "Présentation des appareils de Leonardo Torres-Quevedo", pp. 383-406)
Secondary sourceCommunications of the ACM — "The Birthplace of Artificial Intelligence?" (Herbert Bruderer); Springer — "The Birth of Artificial Intelligence: First Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Paris in 1951?"
Original languageFrench
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