This publication was part of Claude Shannon's personal library.

This book is from 1974 with edits from Shannon and McCarthy, as well as printed drawings in multiple locations by Dieter Roth. Studien zur Theorie der Automaten is roughly based on an original version made in 1956. The original version includes 285 pages compared to the book revised by Shannon and McCarthy with 452 pages. The 1974 version has more information in the back with an autobiography for every author involved. The auto-biography is the only section in the book created in pink pages and has translation by Franz Kaltenbeck and Peter Weibel only in the Automata Studies of 1974.

This book contains a collection of articles from various authors and their work divided into three main sections: 1. Finite Automata 2. Turning Machines 3. Synthesis of Automata. The book also contains an Appendix and a final section of Biography & Bibliography for each author. It is a who's who of early artificial intelligence work including some of the original founders of AI like Marvin Minsky and Nathaniel Rochester alongside C.E. Shannon and J. McCarthy, who are considered the founders of Artificial Intelligence. The book had a delivery note from the publisher in it stating that this copy was "zur Prufung" (for examination).

The Dartmouth Workshop was a brainstorming workshop designed to discuss computers, natural language processing, abstraction, and creativity to name a few. The summer workshop was hosted at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and organized by John McCarthy in 1955. This meeting was said to be the founding event of Artificial Intelligence as a field. McCarthy went to the Rockefeller foundation and proposed for funding including only 10 participants, but the amount of people that actually showed up during the duration was 47, according to McCarthy. The workshop was said to have gone on for eight weeks from about June 18-Aug 17 when it was originally planned to be six weeks. ¹