Allen Newell | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | (1927-03-19)March 19, 1927 |
| Died | July 19, 1992(1992-07-19) (aged 65) |
| Education | Stanford University (BS) Princeton University Carnegie Mellon University (MS,PhD) |
| Known for | Information Processing Language Logic Theorist General Problem Solver Soar Unified Theories of Cognition |
| Spouse | |
| Awards | A.M. Turing Award(1975) IJCAI Award for Research Excellence(1989) IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award(1990) National Medal of Science(1992) Louis E. Levy Medal(1992) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science Cognitive psychology |
| Institutions | Carnegie Mellon University |
| Doctoral advisor | Herbert A. Simon |
| Doctoral students | Hans Berliner Stuart Card John E. Laird Frank Ritter Milind Tambe |
Allen Newell (March 19, 1927 – July 19, 1992) was an American researcher incomputer science andcognitive psychology at theRAND Corporation and atCarnegie Mellon University'sSchool of Computer Science,Tepper School of Business, and Department of Psychology. He,Herbert A. Simon, andCliff Shaw contributed to theInformation Processing Language (1956) and two of the earliestAI programs, theLogic Theorist (1956) and theGeneral Problem Solver (1957). He and Simon were awarded theACM'sA.M. Turing Award in 1975 for their contributions to artificial intelligence and the psychology of human cognition.[1][2]
Newell completed his bachelor's degree in physics fromStanford in 1949. He was a graduate student atPrinceton University from 1949 to 1950, where he studied mathematics. Due to his early exposure to an unknown field known asgame theory and the experiences from the study of mathematics, he was convinced that he would prefer a combination of experimental and theoretical research to pure mathematics.
In 1950, he left Princeton and joined theRAND Corporation in Santa Monica where he worked for "a group that was studying logistics problems of the Air Force".[2] His work withJoseph Kruskal led to the creation of two theories: A Model for Organization Theory and Formulating Precise Concepts in Organization Theory. Newell eventually earned his PhD from the nowTepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon with Herbert Simon serving as his advisor.
Afterwards, Newell "turned to the design and conduct of laboratory experiments on decision making in small groups".[2] He was dissatisfied, however, with the accuracy and validity of their findings produced from small-scale laboratory experiments. He joined with fellow RAND teammates John Kennedy, Bob Chapman, and Bill Biel at an Air ForceEarly Warning Station to study organizational processes in flight crews. They received funding from the Air Force in 1952 to build a simulator that would enable them to examine and analyze the interactions in the cockpit related to decision-making and information-handling. From these studies, Newell came to believe thatinformation processing is the central activity in organizations.[3]
In September 1954, Newell enrolled in a seminar whereOliver Selfridge "described a running computer program that learned to recognize letters and other patterns".[2] This was when Allen came to believe that systems may be created and contain intelligence and have the ability to adapt. With this in mind, Allen, after a couple of months, wrote in 1955The Chess Machine: An Example of Dealing with a Complex Task by Adaptation, which "outlined an imaginative design for a computer program to playchess in humanoid fashion".[2]
His work came to the attention of economist (and future nobel laureate)Herbert A. Simon, and, together with programmerJ. C. Shaw, they developed the first trueartificial intelligence program[4](see notes), theLogic Theorist. Newell's work on the program laid the foundations of the field. His inventions included:list processing, the most important programming paradigm used by AI ever since; the application ofmeans-ends analysis to general reasoning (or "reasoning as search"); and the use ofheuristics to limit the search space.
They presented the program at theDartmouth conference of 1956, an informal gathering of researchers who were interested in simulating intelligence with machines. The conference, now widely considered the "birth of artificial intelligence",[5] was enormously influential and those who attended became the leaders of AI research for the next two decades, Newell included.
Newell and Simon formed a lasting partnership. They founded an artificial intelligence laboratory atCarnegie Mellon University and produced a series of important programs and theoretical insights throughout the late fifties and sixties. This work included theGeneral Problem Solver, a highly influential implementation ofmeans–ends analysis, and thephysical symbol systems hypothesis, the controversial philosophical assertion that all intelligent behavior could be reduced to the kind of symbol manipulation that Newell's programs demonstrated.
Newell's work culminated in the development of acognitive architecture known asSoar and hisunified theory of cognition, published in 1990, but their improvement was the objective of his efforts up to his death (one of the last Newell's lettersArchived 2011-05-14 at theWayback Machine). The field of cognitive architectures, that he initiated, is still active in both the artificial intelligence and computational cognitive science communities.[6]
TheACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award was named in his honor. TheAward for Research Excellence of theCarnegie Mellon School of Computer Science was also named in his honor.
[i]Logic theorist is usually considered the first true AI program, although Arthur Samuel's checkers program was released earlier. Christopher Strachey also wrote a checkers program in 1951[18]
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