Logic Theorist is a computer program written in 1956 by Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon, and Cliff Shaw.
[1][a] Logic Theorist proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in chapter two of Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica, and found new and shorter proofs for some of them.
[3] In 1955, when Newell and Simon began to work on the Logic Theorist, the field of artificial intelligence did not yet exist.
[b] Simon was a political scientist who had already produced classic work in the study of how bureaucracies function as well as developing his theory of bounded rationality (for which he would later win a Nobel Prize).
The study of business organizations requires, like artificial intelligence, an insight into the nature of human problem solving and decision making.
Simon remembers consulting at RAND Corporation in the early 1950s and seeing a printer typing out a map, using ordinary letters and punctuation as symbols.
He realized that a machine that could manipulate symbols could just as well simulate decision making and possibly even the process of human thought.
[5][6] The program that printed the map had been written by Newell, a RAND scientist studying logistics and organization theory.
Their first project was a program that could prove mathematical theorems like the ones used in Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead's Principia Mathematica.
The first version was hand-simulated: they wrote the program onto 3x5 cards and, as Simon recalled:In January 1956, we assembled my wife and three children together with some graduate students.
[14][3] Newell and Simon formed a lasting partnership, founding one of the first AI laboratories at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and developing a series of influential artificial intelligence programs and ideas, including the General Problem Solver, Soar, and their unified theory of cognition.
Simon told a graduate class in January 1956, "Over Christmas, Al Newell and I invented a thinking machine,"[19][20] and would write: [We] invented a computer program capable of thinking non-numerically, and thereby solved the venerable mind-body problem, explaining how a system composed of matter can have the properties of mind.
[21]This statement, that machines can have minds just as people do, would be later named "Strong AI" by philosopher John Searle.
Pamela McCorduck also sees in the Logic Theorist the debut of a new theory of the mind, the information processing model (sometimes called computationalism or cognitivism).