Allen Newell: An AI pioneer

Born in San Francisco in 1927, Allen Newell was not particularly interested in following his father’s footsteps into medicine, and not that interested in science in general. Later in life, Newell was serving on a U.S. Navy ship making scientific observations of the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests. He was assigned the task of conceiving maps of the radiation distribution over the atolls. This particular experience triggered his interest in scientific research.

One of the forefathers of artificial intelligence

Newell is widely remembered for his important contributions to artificial intelligence research.

His primary goal was to understand the cognitive architecture of the human mind and how it allowed humans to solve problems. For Newell, the goal was to make the computer into an efficient tool for simulating human problem-solving. A computer program that solved a problem “in a way that humans did not, or could not” was not much interesting to him, even if it solved that problem “better” than humans did. His hope was to develop programs that solved problems when and how humans succeeded and failed when and how humans failed.

While working at Rand Corporation as a research scientist from 1950 to 1961, he met Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon, then a professor of industrial administration at Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University. Their conversations as to how human thinking could be modeled led Newell to go to Pittsburgh so the two could collaborate. Their first project was a program that could prove mathematical theorems such as the ones used in Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica (a three-volume work on the foundations of mathematics). Newell enlisted the help of a computer programmer from RAND, John Clifford Shaw, to conceive the program which they called Logic Theorist.

In the summer of 1956, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky and Claude Shannon organized a conference at Dartmouth College on the subject of what they called “artificial intelligence” (a term…