Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence
Minsky organised the field into five problems: search, pattern recognition, learning, planning and induction.
Why it matters
The first survey to fix a shared vocabulary; the next twenty years of work were described under exactly these headings.
The paper carries a long bibliography and states the combinatorial explosion plainly: without a way to bound search, none of the approaches scale. Minsky also separates the learning problem from the knowledge representation problem, a distinction that framed the argument for decades.