From that period, Rosenblatt’s work was instrumental to modern AI.
(He's in the pic and I'd guess this article was by a relative.)
Some people consider that the logic-based approach to AI pioneered in this conference contributed to an (what we now call) AI winter. People like John Pierce of Bell Labs, a very influential figure in government, defunded research in computation-based AI such as for speech recognition (he wrote articles, saying, basically, researchers pursuing these techniques are charlatans).
There is no major algorithm or idea in undergrad machine learning textbooks named after these people. There are other people from that era.
>There is no major algorithm or idea in undergrad machine learning textbooks named after these people.
Maybe the pandemonium idea from Selfridge?
Shannon did foundational research in information theory, communications, cryptography, digital relay circuit design, and gambling. Crediting him for impact on AI and machine learning is a bit of a stretch (even though the IEEE Spectrum and Bell Labs published articles claiming credit, indicating that Shannon played a role).
He was an avid chess player, and demonstrated machines doing various things: playing, finding their ways in a maze, juggling etc. It wasn’t based on a foundational theory of computers playing games (and the approach is different from the reinforcement learning or optimization of the models).
Another beginning building block of the field of AI.
Are you even thinking about what you’re writing here or is this the output of an LLM?
I believe your assessment of LISP (and therefore of MacArthy)'s impact on AI to be unfair. Just a few days ago https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp was discussed on this site, for example.