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Subj: The First Artificial Intelligence Program
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The First Artificial Intelligence Program
During 1955 and 1956 computer scientist and cognitive psychologist Allen
Newell, political scientist, economist and sociologist Herbert A. Simon, and
systems programmer John Clifford Shaw, all working at the Rand Corporation in
Santa Monica, California, developed the Logic Theorist, the first program
deliberately engineered to mimic the problem solving skills of a human being.
They decided to write a program that could prove theorems in the propositional
calculus like those in Principia Mathematica by Alfred North Whitehead and
Bertrand Russell. As Simon later wrote,
"LT was based on the system of Principia mathematica, largely because a copy
of that work happened to sit in my bookshelf. There was no intention of making
a contribution to symbolic logic, and the system of Principia was sufficiently
outmoded by that time as to be inappropriate for that purpose. For us, the
important consideration was not the precise task, but its suitability for
demonstrating that a computer could discover problem solutions in a complex
nonnumerical domain by heuristic search that used humanoid heuristics"
(Simon,"Allen Newell: 1927-1992," Annals of the History of Computing 20
[1998] 68).
The collaborators wrote the first version of the program by hand on 3 x 5 inch
cards. As Simon recalled:
"In January 1956, we assembled my wife and three children together with
some graduate students. To each member of the group, we gave one of the
cards, so that each one became, in effect, a component of the computer
program ... Here was nature imitating art imitating nature"
The team showed that the program could prove theorems as well as a talented
mathematician. Eventually Shaw was able to run the program on the computer at
RAND's Santa Monica facility. It proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in
Principia Mathematica. For Theorem 2.85 the Logic Theorist surpassed its
inventors’ expectations by finding a new and better proof. This was the “the
first foray by artificial intelligence research into high-order intellectual
processesö (Feigenbaum and Feldman, Computers and Thought [1963]).
Newell and Simon first described the Logic Theorist in Rand Corporation report
P-868 issued on June 15, 1956, entitled The Logic Theory Machine. A Complex
Information Processing System. The report was first officially published in
September, 1956 under the same title in IRE Transactions on Information
Theory IT-2, 61-79.
Newell and Simon demonstrated the program at the Dartmouth Summer Session on
Artificial Intelligence held during the summer of 1956.
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