Logic Theorist

                                      Logic Theorist

Artificial Intelligence or Automated Reasoning, how did it look like in the first place? It all started in 1955 when a program proved 38 out of 52 theorems in Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica using logic rules. It was the first-time world had witnessed Artificial Intelligence even before the term Artificial Intelligence was coined. Two Scientists Newell and Simon had worked together on this program. Simon was a political scientist and he recognized that machines that could manipulate symbols could similarly perform the human ability of logical reasoning and decision making. He worked with Newell who was a RAND scientist studying logistics and organization theory and printed the map of the program called LOGIC THEORIST.

The working of Logic Theorist was based on the principal search tree. The root of the tree was the initial hypothesis, and the branches were deduced using logic rules. Somewhere in the tree lied the central concept of the problem to be solved. After a few tests, Simon and Newell realized that the tree would grow exponentially. They needed to trim the tree using ‘Rules of Thumb’ to determine which pathways are useless. They termed this term as ‘Heuristics’ and this method remains important to overcome the exponential growth of programs. To implement Logic Theorist on computer the three researchers introduced a programming language IPL, Information Processing Language. Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw, and Herbert A. Simon created this programming language at RAND corporation and the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1956. The program intended to perform problem solving abilities like lists, dynamic memory allocation, data types, recursion, functions, and multitasking. IPL laid the foundation of symbolic list processing that was later used for McCarthy’s Lisp Programming Language in 1960.

The term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was termed by ‘John McCarthy’ assistant professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth College in 1956 at Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. Hence, this Dartmouth Workshop is considered as the founding event to the field of Artificial Intelligence.