What they got right

Their predictions were wrong. Their work still mattered.

Newell and Simon showed that a program could reproduce some work previously treated as reasoning. A computer could do more than . It could follow possible chains of steps and find one that reached a goal.

They were wrong about the timeline. Their successes did not establish that search alone would explain every part of intelligence. They also underestimated how difficult the remaining parts would be.

Their programs gave the new field something concrete to test, improve, or reject.

They did not solve intelligence. They made part of it workable.