PANEL: HISTORY OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE RESEARCH, 1956-61

PANEL: HISTORY OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE RESEARCH, 1956-61

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Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. .

Abstract

Bernstein, A. and Roberts, M. deV. 1958, Comput Vs. Chess-Player, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN , Jun
Feigenbaum, E., 1961. The Simulation of Verbal Learning Behavior. PROCEEDINGS OF THE WESTERN JOINT COMPUTER CONFERENCE, 19:121- 132.
Feigenbaum, E., and feldman, J., COMPUTERS AND THOUGHT, 1963, McGraw-Hill.
Feloman, J., 1961. Simulation of Behavior in the Binary Choice Experiment, PROCEEDINGS OF THE WESTERN JOINT COMPUTER CONFERENCE, May 9-11, 1961, pp~ 133-144.
Gelernter, H., 1959. Realization of a Geometry Theorem-Proving Machine,PROCEEDINGS OF THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INFORMATION PROCESSING, 1959, Paris:UNESCO House. pp273-282.
Gelernter, H., Hansen, J.R., and Loveland, D.W. , 1960. Empirical Exploration of the Geom- etry Theorem Machine, PROCEEDINGS OF THE WESTERN JOINT COMPUTER CONFERENCE, May 3-5, 1960. pp143-147.
Lindsay, R.K., 1962. A Program for Parsing Sentences and Making inferences About Kinship Relations, PROCEEDINGS OF THE WESTERN MANAGEMENT SCIENCE CONFERENCE ON SIMULATION.
McCarthy, J., 1959. Programs with Common Sense, PROCEEDINGS OF THE SYMPOSIUM ON MECHANI- SATION OF THOUGHT PROCESSES. National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, England, London: H. M. Stationary Office.
McCarthy, J., 1960. Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions, COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTING MACHINERY, 3(1960).
Minsky, M.L., 1961. Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence, PROCEEDINGS OF THE IRE, 1961. Special computer issue.
Newell, A., 1955. The Chess Machine, PROCEEDINGS OF THE 1955 WESTERN JOINT COMPUTER CON- FERENCE, Session on Learning Machines, pp 85-111, March 1-3, 1955.
Newe ll , A., and Simon, H.A., 1956. The Logi c Theory Machine, IRE TRANSACTIONS ON INFOR- MATION THEORY, IT-2(3):61-79.
Newel l , A., and Shaw, J.C,, 1957.Programming the Logib Theory Machine, PROCEEDINGS OF THE WESTERN JOINT COMPUTER CONFERENCE, pp230- 240.
Ne well , A., Shaw, J. C., and Simon, H.A., 1958a, Elements of a theory of human problem- solving, PSYCHOLOGICAL REVIEW, March, 65: 151-166.
Newell , A., Shaw, J.C., and Simon, H.A., 1958b. Chess-playing Programs and the Problem of Complexity, IBM JOURNAL Of RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, 2(4):320-335.
Newel l, A., Shaw, J.C., and Simon, H.A., 1959. Report on a General Problem-Solving Program, PROCEEDINGS Of THE INTERNATIONAL CONFER- ENCE ON INFORMATION PROCESSING,1959, Paris: UNESCO House.
Ne well, A., (ed.), 1961. INFORMATION PROCESSING LANGUAGE V MANUAL, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall.
Samuel, A.L . , 1959. Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers , IBM JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, 3(3): 210-229 .
Sel frid ge, O.G., 1955. Pattern Recogn i tion and Modern Computers, PROCEEDINGS Of THE 1955 WESTERN JOINT COMPUTER CONFERENCE, Session on Learning Machines, pp91-93.
Selfri dge, O.G., 1959. Pandemonium: A Paradigm for Learning, PROC8EDINGS Of THE SYMPO- SIUM ON MECHANISATION OF THOUGHT PROC8SSES, National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, England, pp511-529.
Sl agle , J., 1961. A COMPUTER PROGRAM fOR SOLVING PROBLEMS IN fRESHMAN CALCULUS (SAINT ) , doctora l dissertation, M assachu- s ett s I nstitu t e of Technology, Camb r i dge, M A. Tonge, f.M., 1960. An Assembly Line Ba l anc i ng Pr oc edu re, MANAGEMENT SCIENCE, 7 (1) :2 1-42.

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PANEL: HISTORY OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE RESEARCH, 1956-61

Edward A. Feigenbaum, Pane l rhairman romputer Science Department Stanford University St anford, CA 94305

Understanding the history of the develop ment of a body of ideas is often a precondition for a creative contribution to that body of ideas. The AI field seems to lack a sense of its own history. It is a field of practi tioners rather than scholars. This is paradox ical s i nce the field is not yet a quarter-cen tury old, and many of the principal scient ists at tending its birth are still vigorously active

in it s development.

Realizing this, the IJCAI Program Commit tee organized a panel on the history of AI at IJCAI77, and the current Program Committee chose t o continue this biannual educational event . As it happened, the members of the 1977 panel chose to range broadly over the ~pre history~ of the field--from the Greeks through post-war cybernetics. Not discussed in detail were t he critical int ellectual events of the forma t ive period, 1956-61. It is to t his peri od t hat the IJCAI79 panel will devote its

attent ion.

The formative period can be charact erized by it s intellectual themes, by the programs that were written to test ideas, and by the individuals who made the contributions.

The two major themes of AI work--mach i nes that reason and perceive, and information processing models of human cognition--were much more c losely in t ertwined then than they are now. For example, the Logic Theorist (LT, 1956 ), along with Samuel's Checker Player (1955- 56) t he first heuristic programs that ran on computers, helped to launch the ~smart machin es~ work of our field. LT also ·was a major event in Psychology when its descr i p tion appeared i n Psychological Review as ~Element s of a Theory of Human Problem Sol ving~ (Newell and Simon). Similarly, the Genera l Probl em Solver (GPS, 1957-59) was for years a major focus of AI's problem solving r esearch, whil e at the same time standing as the most compl ex and detailed model of a human thought process that had ever been constructed and tes ted.

In the formative period, the major events were clustered in a Carnegie Tech/RAND Cor poration collaboration, led by Newell, Shaw, and Simon; an MIT group led by McCarthy and Minsky; and IBM projects of Samuel and Gelern ter, et. al. In a remarkable burst of crea tivity that began in late 1955, Newell, Shaw, and Simon conceived LT; invented list pro ces s i ng (IPLI and II) to handle the novel programming problems of writing LT; conceived and programmed GPS and the NSS Chess Flayer; and made various programming innovations that were embodied in IPLIII, IV, and V (all 195759). Seminally related to these events were papers by Newell (1955) on an adaptive chess machine and by Simon on a behavioral theory of rat i onal choice and the influence of t he envi ronment on problem solving and decision making. These two papers of Simon were in a sense the culmination of years of study on the bounds of individual and organizational information processing and rationality; and the processes by which people and organizations made decisions and solved problems within these bounds. It is for this work, initially addressed to economists and behavioral scientists, that Simon won the Nobel Prize in 1978. The students of Newell and Simon also produced a number of key pro grams of the time including: the EPAM model of human verbal learning and memory (Feigenbaum, 1959); a model of hypothesis formation in bi nary-choice decision making (Julian Feldman, 1959 ) ; an early natual-language understander, SAD-SAM (Lindsay); and an application to a management science problem of assembly line balancing (Tonge).

At IBM, Gelernter and his group, with support from Rochester, proceeded to program t he Geometry Theorem Prover. They too created a l ist processing system, FLPL (Fortran List Processing Language, 1959). Samuel contin ued developing and experimenting with his Checker Player, particularly the learning feature in which self-improvement of the play took place by a "hill-climbing" adjustment of the weights of an evaluation function. And Bernstein, a programmer/chess master, developed another of the early chess programs.

Other important activity had a New England locus. Two important early conferences were held there: the Dartmouth Summer Conference on Arti ficial Intelligence (1956) and the meeting of the IEEE Professional Group on Information Theory (1956, a conference noted as the first formal presentations of LT and of Chomsky's linguistic theory). At Lincoln Laboratory, Selfridge and Dineen wrote the first character recognition program (approximately 1955); and later Selfridge and his group wrote the influ ential pattern recognition system Pandemonium (1959).

McCarthy formulated a number of problems of the interaction of mathematics and mathemat ical logic with programming and artificial intelligence. Understanding the importance of the list structure and list processing inno vations, and merging these with his thinking about formal representations and about proofs of the properties of programs, he invented the LISP notation that was the basis for the development of LISP translators at MIT in later years. Slagle, at MIT, extended ideas on heuristic search with his Symbolic Integration program, SAINT. Minsky labored to organize the cascade of early ideas and produced his impor tant paper "Steps toward Artificial Intelli gence". And McCarthy suggested the idea of time-sharing a computer, reflecting the con cerns of the AI community for both economical interaction with running AI programs, and with programming efficiency.

Fortune smiled upon the editors of the collection Computers and Thought (Feigenbaum and Feldman, 1963), which turned out to contain an almost unblurred image of the intellectual activity of the formative period. Participants of this formative period have organized the IJCAI79 panel on the History of AI (1956-61). They are:

Professor Saul Amarel, Professor and Chairman, Computer Science, Rutgers University

Professor John McCarthy, Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University

Professor Herbert A. Simon, Professor of Computer Science and Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University Professor Edward A. Feigenbaum, Professor and Chairman of Computer Science, Stanford Univer sity.

. 1979. PANEL: HISTORY OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE RESEARCH, 1956-61. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-79. IJCAI, https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1979/231

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  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on
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  publisher = {International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence},
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  year      = {1979},
  month     = {8},
  url       = {https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1979/231},
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[1] Bernstein, A. and Roberts, M. deV. 1958, Comput Vs. Chess-Player, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN , Jun

[2] Feigenbaum, E., 1961. The Simulation of Verbal Learning Behavior. PROCEEDINGS OF THE WESTERN JOINT COMPUTER CONFERENCE, 19:121- 132.

[3] Feigenbaum, E., and feldman, J., COMPUTERS AND THOUGHT, 1963, McGraw-Hill.

[4] Feloman, J., 1961. Simulation of Behavior in the Binary Choice Experiment, PROCEEDINGS OF THE WESTERN JOINT COMPUTER CONFERENCE, May 9-11, 1961, pp~ 133-144.

[5] Gelernter, H., 1959. Realization of a Geometry Theorem-Proving Machine,PROCEEDINGS OF THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INFORMATION PROCESSING, 1959, Paris:UNESCO House. pp273-282.

[6] Gelernter, H., Hansen, J.R., and Loveland, D.W. , 1960. Empirical Exploration of the Geom- etry Theorem Machine, PROCEEDINGS OF THE WESTERN JOINT COMPUTER CONFERENCE, May 3-5, 1960. pp143-147.

[7] Lindsay, R.K., 1962. A Program for Parsing Sentences and Making inferences About Kinship Relations, PROCEEDINGS OF THE WESTERN MANAGEMENT SCIENCE CONFERENCE ON SIMULATION.

[8] McCarthy, J., 1959. Programs with Common Sense, PROCEEDINGS OF THE SYMPOSIUM ON MECHANI- SATION OF THOUGHT PROCESSES. National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, England, London: H. M. Stationary Office.

[9] McCarthy, J., 1960. Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions, COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTING MACHINERY, 3(1960).

[10] Minsky, M.L., 1961. Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence, PROCEEDINGS OF THE IRE, 1961. Special computer issue.

[11] Newell, A., 1955. The Chess Machine, PROCEEDINGS OF THE 1955 WESTERN JOINT COMPUTER CON- FERENCE, Session on Learning Machines, pp 85-111, March 1-3, 1955.

[12] Newe ll , A., and Simon, H.A., 1956. The Logi c Theory Machine, IRE TRANSACTIONS ON INFOR- MATION THEORY, IT-2(3):61-79.

[13] Newel l , A., and Shaw, J.C,, 1957.Programming the Logib Theory Machine, PROCEEDINGS OF THE WESTERN JOINT COMPUTER CONFERENCE, pp230- 240.

[14] Ne well , A., Shaw, J. C., and Simon, H.A., 1958a, Elements of a theory of human problem- solving, PSYCHOLOGICAL REVIEW, March, 65: 151-166.

[15] Newell , A., Shaw, J.C., and Simon, H.A., 1958b. Chess-playing Programs and the Problem of Complexity, IBM JOURNAL Of RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, 2(4):320-335.

[16] Newel l, A., Shaw, J.C., and Simon, H.A., 1959. Report on a General Problem-Solving Program, PROCEEDINGS Of THE INTERNATIONAL CONFER- ENCE ON INFORMATION PROCESSING,1959, Paris: UNESCO House.

[17] Ne well, A., (ed.), 1961. INFORMATION PROCESSING LANGUAGE V MANUAL, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall.

[18] Samuel, A.L . , 1959. Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers , IBM JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, 3(3): 210-229 .

[19] Sel frid ge, O.G., 1955. Pattern Recogn i tion and Modern Computers, PROCEEDINGS Of THE 1955 WESTERN JOINT COMPUTER CONFERENCE, Session on Learning Machines, pp91-93.

[20] Selfri dge, O.G., 1959. Pandemonium: A Paradigm for Learning, PROC8EDINGS Of THE SYMPO- SIUM ON MECHANISATION OF THOUGHT PROC8SSES, National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, England, pp511-529.

[21] Sl agle , J., 1961. A COMPUTER PROGRAM fOR SOLVING PROBLEMS IN fRESHMAN CALCULUS (SAINT ) , doctora l dissertation, M assachu- s ett s I nstitu t e of Technology, Camb r i dge, M A. Tonge, f.M., 1960. An Assembly Line Ba l anc i ng Pr oc edu re, MANAGEMENT SCIENCE, 7 (1) :2 1-42.