Loading slide
The Logic Theorist did not understand mathematics. It did not know what a theorem meant. It had a toolbox of rules: if your expression looks like this, you can rewrite it like that.
Think of it like navigating a maze with one simple rule: always move toward where the exit looks closest. You are not planning a route. You are not thinking about the layout. You just keep picking the step that seems to close the gap.
That is what the Logic Theorist did. At each step, it looked at the current expression and the target theorem, picked whichever rule seemed to reduce the distance, and kept going. When a path led nowhere, it backed up and tried another branch.
When it succeeded, it was not insight. It was good navigation: following rules that pointed in roughly the right direction, without ever knowing where it was going.
That is still impressive. Navigating well is genuinely hard. But it is not the same as understanding.