Textbook of AI

1927–1992, Cognitive scientist, AI pioneer

Also known as: A. Newell

Allen Newell, with Herbert Simon and Cliff Shaw, wrote what is generally regarded as the first running AI program, the Logic Theorist (1956), which proved 38 of the first 52 theorems of Principia Mathematica. The trio, working between RAND in Santa Monica and Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon) in Pittsburgh, produced the General Problem Solver (GPS) in 1957, the first AI system designed to imitate the structure of human problem solving by means–ends analysis.

With Simon, Newell formulated the physical symbol system hypothesis in their 1976 ACM Turing Award lecture Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search: a physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for general intelligent action. The hypothesis was the philosophical bedrock of classical symbolic AI for thirty years and remains a touchstone of cognitive architecture research.

Newell's later career focused on building Soar (from 1983), a unified cognitive architecture that aimed to provide a single mechanism for the full range of cognitive behaviour. His final book Unified Theories of Cognition (1990) argued that cognitive science should aspire to comprehensive computational theories rather than narrow models. He won the Turing Award jointly with Simon in 1975 and the National Medal of Science in 1992 just months before his death.