What they got right

It would be easy to dismiss them. Don't.

Newell and Simon were right that intelligence involves search. They were right that a messy problem could be rewritten as something precise enough for a machine to work on. They were right that a machine could do real thinking work, not just .

They were wrong about the timeline. They were wrong that search alone would be enough. They were wrong about how hard the hard parts would be.

But they gave the field its first working programs, its vocabulary, and the conviction that the question was worth chasing at all. Every researcher who came after built on what they started.

They didn't solve intelligence. They opened the door.