MPPSC 2026 Prelims Paper-I · Question 37 of 100

Correct — D, John McCarthy. The phrase 'artificial intelligence' was introduced by McCarthy in the proposal dated 31 August 1955 for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, which he wrote with Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon. The workshop itself was held in the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College and is treated as the founding event of AI as a field. McCarthy went on to create the Lisp programming language (1958) and is widely called the 'father of Artificial Intelligence'.

• (a)John Winston — Not a figure in the history of AI. The 'John' you are meant to recall is John McCarthy — the first name is the bait, the surname is what decides the answer.
• (b)Richard Evans — No computer scientist of this name is associated with coining the term. The founding names of AI to remember are McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester and Shannon.
• (c)Henry Samuel — A deliberate near-miss. The Samuel in computing history is Arthur Samuel, who coined the term 'machine learning' in 1959 and wrote the famous checkers-playing program — not 'Henry', and not the coiner of 'artificial intelligence'.

AI became a named research field at the 1956 Dartmouth workshop, whose 1955 proposal carried the phrase 'artificial intelligence' for the first time. The proposal's conjecture — that every aspect of learning or intelligence can be described precisely enough for a machine to simulate it — still defines the field's ambition. Work that came before it (Turing's 1950 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence', with the imitation game now called the Turing Test) was foundational but predates the label itself.

Exams test AI history as a name-to-milestone chain, and set traps by keeping the right surname's shape while changing the first name, or by offering an adjacent pioneer (Turing, Arthur Samuel) who is famous for something else. Fix three anchors — Turing 1950 (test), McCarthy 1955-56 (term + Dartmouth), Samuel 1959 ('machine learning') — and every variant of this question resolves.

• 'Artificial Intelligence' was coined by John McCarthy in the 31 August 1955 proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project; the workshop ran in summer 1956.
• The proposal's four authors — John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester (IBM) and Claude Shannon — are regarded as founding fathers of AI.
• McCarthy developed Lisp (1958), for decades the standard AI programming language.
• Alan Turing's 1950 paper proposed the imitation game (Turing Test) — before the term 'artificial intelligence' existed.
• Arthur Samuel coined the term 'machine learning' in 1959.

• Picking Alan Turing — he founded the philosophical test for machine intelligence but did not coin the term.
• Picking a 'Samuel' option — Arthur Samuel coined 'machine learning', not 'artificial intelligence'.
• Mixing the dates: the term appears in the 1955 proposal, the workshop was held in 1956.

MPPSC asks it as a person-fact ('father of AI' / 'who coined the term'); UPSC asks what AI can currently do or pairs AI terms with their context. Cover both: memorise the name-date chain and be able to judge real-world AI capability claims.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project is regarded as the founding event of which field?

  • (a)Quantum computing
  • (b)Artificial Intelligence
  • (c)Cryptography
  • (d)Computer networking

  Answer(b) Artificial Intelligence — the workshop that gave the field its name and its first research agenda.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following correctly describes the relationship between the three terms?

  • (a)Deep Learning ⊃ Machine Learning ⊃ Artificial Intelligence
  • (b)Artificial Intelligence ⊃ Machine Learning ⊃ Deep Learning
  • (c)Machine Learning ⊃ Artificial Intelligence ⊃ Deep Learning
  • (d)All three are independent, non-overlapping fields

  Answer(b) Artificial Intelligence is the broadest field; Machine Learning is a subset of it, and Deep Learning is a subset of Machine Learning.