Textbook of AI

1922–1991, Programmer at RAND

Also known as: John Clifford Shaw, J. C. Shaw

John Clifford Shaw was an American programmer at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica who, with Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, wrote the Logic Theorist (1956), the General Problem Solver (1957) and the early NSS chess program. He designed and implemented the Information Processing Language family (IPL-I through IPL-V), the first list-processing language and a major influence on John McCarthy's LISP.

Shaw is the least-celebrated of the Newell–Shaw–Simon trio because he was not an academic; he produced no books, supervised no students and was rarely cited in the way Newell and Simon were. But every line of code in the early Carnegie–RAND programs went through him, and the practical realisation of symbolic AI in the 1950s would have been impossible without him.