Textbook of AI

1916–2001, Polymath; political scientist, economist, AI pioneer

Also known as: Herbert A. Simon, Herb Simon

Herbert Alexander Simon was an American polymath whose career bridged political science, economics, cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence with rare distinction. With Allen Newell and Cliff Shaw he wrote the Logic Theorist (1956), the General Problem Solver (1957) and a sequence of further AI programs that established Carnegie Mellon as a world centre of AI research.

In economics Simon won the 1978 Nobel Memorial Prize for his theory of bounded rationality, the recognition that real decision-makers, human or artificial, operate under cognitive and computational limits and so must satisfice rather than optimise. The framework reshaped microeconomics, organisational theory and behavioural economics, and re-emerges in modern AI discussions of resource-bounded agents and approximate Bayesian inference.

With Newell, Simon proposed the physical symbol system hypothesis in their 1976 Turing Award lecture and wrote the influential 1972 book Human Problem Solving, which argued, controversially, that human and machine cognition could profitably be studied in the same terms. He won the Turing Award (1975), the Nobel Prize in Economics (1978), the National Medal of Science (1986) and the John von Neumann Theory Prize (1988).