The Logic Theorist

Before the summer ended, Newell and Simon arrived with something the field had never seen: the first working AI program.

They called it the Logic Theorist. Its job was to prove automatically.

They gave it , a famous book that lays out mathematics' logical foundations, theorem by theorem.

The Logic Theorist worked through the first 52 theorems and proved 38 of them. For one, it found a shorter, more elegant proof than the book's own.

Newell and Simon sent the result to a mathematics journal, listing the Logic Theorist as co-author.

The editors rejected it. A computer, they said, cannot do mathematics.

Before the summer ended, Newell and Simon arrived with something the field had never seen: the first working AI program.

They called it the Logic Theorist. Its job was to prove automatically.

They gave it , a famous book that lays out mathematics' logical foundations, theorem by theorem.

The Logic Theorist worked through the first 52 theorems and proved 38 of them. For one, it found a shorter, more elegant proof than the book's own.

Newell and Simon sent the result to a mathematics journal, listing the Logic Theorist as co-author.

The editors rejected it. A computer, they said, cannot do mathematics.