Logic Theorist was the first artificially intelligent program, created in 1955 by Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, and actually predating the term “artificial intelligence,” which was introduced the next year. Logic Theorist could apply the rules of symbolic logic to prove mathematical theorems – the first time a computer accomplished a task considered solely within the domain of human intelligence. Given a starting statement, it applied logical laws to generate a set of new statements, then recursively continued the process. Eventually, this procedure would discover a chain of logical transformations that connected the starting statement to the desired final statement. Applied naively, this process would generate an intractable number of possible paths, but Logic Theorist had the ability to detect and discard infeasible paths that couldn’t lead to a solution.
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