During the summer of 1956, in a lecture hall at Dartmouth University - one of the universities belonging to the Ivy League group - a group of scientists gathered for a workshop. That meeting, known as the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, is today considered the official birth of artificial intelligence (AI). The idea was not entirely new: the furrow had already been laid by the British mathematician Alan Turing, inventor of the famous "Turing Test", the ability of a computer to mimic human behaviour. Thanks to this test, Turing had been able to create a machine capable of predicting and deciphering the Enigma code, used by the Nazis during the Second World War. Returning to Dartmouth, it was mathematician John McCarthy (who was also the inventor of the term Artificial Intelligence) who proposed the workshop. Along with him are other pioneers of artificial intelligence such as Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon and Nathaniel Rochester. The aim of the workshop was extremely ambitious: to study every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence that a machine is capable of simulating. In short, the intelligence that McCarthy and his colleagues had in mind was of an imitative nature: any system can be considered intelligent if it is able to mechanically follow instructions, without the need to develop new solutions or predictions from scratch. Although expectations were overly optimistic - it was thought that in a few years machines would be able to fully emulate human intelligence - the workshop marked the beginning of an interdisciplinary field of research that would radically influence the world. Despite having gone through a particularly complex period due to the lack of funding during the 1970s and 1980s, the field of AI research today is particularly flourishing and undergoing a phase of great expansion.