What the program was actually doing

The Logic Theorist didn't understand mathematics. It didn't know what a theorem meant. It had a toolbox of rules: "If your expression looks like this, you can change it to that."

Think of it like navigating a maze by always turning toward the exit. You're not trying every path. You're using a rule to decide which way to go next. No understanding of where the exit leads. Just: does this move get me closer?

That's what the Logic Theorist did. At each step, it looked at the current expression and the target theorem, picked whichever rule seemed to close the gap, and kept going. When a path led nowhere, it backed up and tried a different branch.

When it succeeded, it wasn't insight. It was good navigation: following rules that pointed in roughly the right direction, without ever knowing where it was going.

Still impressive. Navigating well is genuinely hard. But it's not the same as mathematical understanding.