Artificial intelligence and neural networks - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 267

B.13.4. A famous photograph of four of the founding fathers of AI. From left to right
they are Claude Shannon, John McCarthy, Ed Fredkin, and Joseph Weizenbaum.
logic. Newell and Simon attempted to use Logic Theorist to reproduce the
proofs of ifty-two theorems in Whitehead and Russell's topic:
Let us consider more specifically whether we should regard the Logic Theorist
as creative. When the Logic Theorist is presented with a purported theorem
in elementary symbolic logic, it attempts to find a proof. In the problems
we have actually posed it, which were theorems drawn from Chapter 2 of
Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica , it has found the proof about
three times out of four. 10
On being told that the program had found a shorter proof for one of their
theorems, Bertrand Russell was reportedly delighted. Newell, Shaw, and Simon
attempted - unsuccessfully - to publish their result in the Journal of Symbolic
Logic with the Logic Theorist program listed as a co-author.
McCarthy moved from Dartmouth to MIT in 1958 and in the same year made
three major contributions to computer science. One was the suggestion for time-
sharing systems, as we have seen in Chapter 3 . A second was his invention of the
Lisp programming language, an acronym derived from LISt Processing. Lisp was
the dominant language for AI applications for the next thirty years. McCarthy's
third major contribution was to lay out a research agenda for the AI community in
a paper called “Programs with Common Sense.” In the paper, McCarthy described
a hypothetical AI program he called Advice Taker. Like Newell and Simon's Logic
Theorist and their ambitious follow-up, the General Problem Solver, Advice Taker
would not only use logic and symbol manipulation , the manipulation of characters
rather than numbers, but also incorporate general knowledge about the world to
assist in its deductive process:
The main advantages we expect the advice taker to have is that its behavior will
be improvable merely by making statements to it, telling it about its symbolic
B.13.5. Herbert Simon (1916-2001) and Allen Newell (1927-92) were pioneers in the field
of AI. They were awarded the Turing Award in 1975 for their work in AI, and Simon also won the
Nobel Prize in economics in 1978 for his theory of decision making.