Logic Theorist

Why It Was Important

Developed before the Dartmouth conference, Logic Theorist was the first program deliberately engineered to mimic human problem-solving skills. It successfully proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, proving that machines could perform symbolic logic, not just number crunching.

Who Invented It

Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon, Cliff Shaw

Pioneers of cognitive psychology and computer science at RAND and Carnegie Mellon.

Applications

• Automated Theorem Proving
• Symbolic Logic
• Heuristic Search