Details
NEWELL, Allen (1927-1992) and Herbert A. SIMON (1916-2001). The logic theory machine. Reproduced typescript. Offprint from IRE Transactions on Information Theory IT-2 (September 1956).
4o. Without wrappers as issued.
FIRST EDITION. Newell and Simon's logic theory machine (LT), first described in this paper, is the earliest AI program. It has been called the first foray by artificial intelligence into high-order intellectual processes. On August 31, 1955 Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy, together with Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon sent an invitation to a summer session at Dartmouth that they were planning to conduct research on what they called "Artificial Intelligence." Remarkably their invitation named the field and also set out the basic goals. At the Dartmouth summer session on AI Alan Newell and Herbert Simon demonstrated the first AI program, the Logic Theorist, to find the basic equations of logic as defined in Principia Mathematica by Whitehead and Russell. For one of the equations, the Logic Theorist surpassed its inventors' expectations by finding a new and better proof.
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 1998, 68). This paper is concerned exclusively with specification of the system, not with its realization in a computer. In two later papers, co-written with J. C. Shaw (Proceedings of the Western Joint Computer Conference [1957]: 218-29, 230-40), the authors described empirical explorations with the logic theory machine and reported on the Information Processing Language used to program the machine -- the first list processing computer language. OOC 815.
4
FIRST EDITION. Newell and Simon's logic theory machine (LT), first described in this paper, is the earliest AI program. It has been called the first foray by artificial intelligence into high-order intellectual processes. On August 31, 1955 Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy, together with Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon sent an invitation to a summer session at Dartmouth that they were planning to conduct research on what they called "Artificial Intelligence." Remarkably their invitation named the field and also set out the basic goals. At the Dartmouth summer session on AI Alan Newell and Herbert Simon demonstrated the first AI program, the Logic Theorist, to find the basic equations of logic as defined in Principia Mathematica by Whitehead and Russell. For one of the equations, the Logic Theorist surpassed its inventors' expectations by finding a new and better proof.
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 1998, 68). This paper is concerned exclusively with specification of the system, not with its realization in a computer. In two later papers, co-written with J. C. Shaw (Proceedings of the Western Joint Computer Conference [1957]: 218-29, 230-40), the authors described empirical explorations with the logic theory machine and reported on the Information Processing Language used to program the machine -- the first list processing computer language. OOC 815.
Further details
For further information about The Origins of Cyberspace Library and to view the reference catalogue, please visit https://www.historyofscience.com.