The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence (AI) is widely regarded as the moment that marked the birth of artificial intelligence as a field of research. The workshop spanned eight weeks and was held at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The conference brought together 20 leading experts from computer science, cognitive psychology, and mathematics. John McCarthy, who coined the term 'artificial intelligence', and Minsky, who was then at Harvard, formulated the written proposal addressed to the Rockefeller Foundation at Dartmouth. Supported by senior faculty, Claude Shannon and Nathaniel Rochester, the group shared the common belief that "computation is a formally deducible phenomenon that can be understood scientifically and that the digital computer is the best non-human instrument for doing so." Out of this gathering came not only a name for the field but its founding paradigm, Symbolic AI, the first answer to "how do we actually do this?" The field begins at Dartmouth, and its first approach begins with it: the belief that intelligence could be modeled as formal symbols and rules, the assumption that would guide AI research for the next three decades. The birth of the field and the birth of its first school of thought are, in this sense, one story.