- Person
- Herbert Simon
- Lived
- 1916–2001
- Field
- Decision science, AI
- From
- American
The story
Herbert Simon was born in Milwaukee in 1916; his father, Arthur Simon, was a Jewish electrical engineer from Germany. Trained as a political scientist, Simon spent the 1940s studying how organisations make decisions, and concluded that people do not optimise perfectly but use rules of thumb within the limits of what they know. By the early 1950s he suspected that a computer, which manipulates symbols, could be used to simulate that kind of reasoning.
At the RAND Corporation he met Allen Newell, and around 1954 the two decided to study human problem-solving by writing computer programs that imitate it. With the programmer Cliff Shaw they began in 1955 on a program that could prove theorems in logic, and they completed it in 1956. Before it ran on RAND’s computer, Simon tested it by hand, giving cards with steps of the program to his wife, his children and some graduate students and having them act as parts of the machine. The Logic Theorist proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in the second chapter of Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica, and found a new, shorter proof of one. It was the first program deliberately engineered to perform automated reasoning and has often been called the first artificial intelligence program.
To build it the team invented a family of list-processing languages, IPL, whose linked lists became a standard structure in computer science. They went on to write the General Problem Solver in 1957, which separated general problem-solving methods from knowledge about particular tasks. Their central technique, heuristic search, cuts a huge space of possibilities down to size by using rules of thumb, and it remains a basic idea in AI programs for planning, games and puzzles. Later work by Simon and colleagues on production rules fed into the expert systems used in industry and medicine.
In 1975 Simon and Newell received the Turing Award for basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition and list processing. At Carnegie Mellon they helped build one of the first and strongest computer science programmes in the world.
Why it matters
The Logic Theorist and the methods behind it, heuristic search and list processing, helped found artificial intelligence and remain part of how computers plan, search and reason today.
About Herbert Simon
Milwaukee-born polymath who showed how people and organisations really decide with limited information, and co-created some of the first artificial intelligence programs. Nobel 1978.
More about Herbert Simon
Sources
- Logic Theorist Wikipedia
- Herbert A. Simon IEEE Computer Society, Computer Pioneers
- Herbert A. Simon, Biographical NobelPrize.org
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.