Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw and Herbert Simon Build the Logic Theorist

The quest for machines that did more than just blindly follow instructions in binary determinacy, for machines that actually think, is a long one, covered many times on this Timeline (Lady Lovelace’s Objection, the Turing Test, the Homeostat).

For instance, in January 1956 Herbert A. Simon told his class, "Over Christmas Allen Newell and I invented a thinking machine." With Cliff Shaw at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, they had built the Logic Theorist, a program that searched for proofs in symbolic logic using heuristics modeled on human problem solving.

At the now legendary Dartmouth workshop that summer, where the term "artificial intelligence" was coined, the three described IPL, the list-processing language in which they wrote it. By 1957, running on RAND's JOHNNIAC computer, the Logic Theorist had proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in chapter 2 of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica.

Logic with learning would prove a valuable combination in the decades ahead.