General Problem Solver (GPS) is a computer program created in 1957 by Herbert A. Simon, J. C. Shaw, and Allen Newell (RAND Corporation) intended to work as a universal problem solver machine.
[1] Any problem that can be expressed as a set of well-formed formulas (WFFs) or Horn clauses, and that constitutes a directed graph with one or more sources (that is, hypotheses) and sinks (that is, desired conclusions), can be solved, in principle, by GPS.
Proofs in the predicate logic and Euclidean geometry problem spaces are prime examples of the domain of applicability of GPS.
(In practice, even a straightforward state space search such as the Towers of Hanoi can become computationally infeasible, albeit judicious prunings of the state space can be achieved by such elementary AI techniques as A* and IDA*).
The GPS paradigm eventually evolved into the Soar architecture for artificial intelligence.