DENDRAL is an early artificial intelligence program developed in the 1960s at Stanford University. It was designed to assist chemists in identifying molecular structures based on mass spectrometry data. By analyzing the patterns in the data, DENDRAL could suggest possible chemical formulas and structures, significantly speeding up the process of chemical analysis. The program is notable for being one of the first successful applications of AI in a scientific field. It utilized a combination of heuristic rules and knowledge representation to make inferences about chemical compounds, paving the way for future developments in both AI and computational chemistry.