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NEWELL, ALLEN & HERBERT A. SIMON. The Logic Theory Machine. [September, 1956.] image 1
NEWELL, ALLEN & HERBERT A. SIMON. The Logic Theory Machine. [September, 1956.] image 2
Lot 51

NEWELL, ALLEN & HERBERT A. SIMON.
The Logic Theory Machine. [September, 1956.]

4 December 2019, 13:00 EST
New York

Sold for US$3,825 inc. premium

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NEWELL, ALLEN & HERBERT A. SIMON.

The Logic Theory Machine. [September, 1956.]
4to (278 x 215 mm). Self wrappers, custom cloth folder and black morocco-backed slipcase. first and final leaves toned and with some tiny chips to extremities.
Offprint from the IRE Transactions on Information Theory IT-2.

FIRST EDITION of this work discussing what is considered the first artificial intelligence program. Newell and Simon had met while working for the RAND Corporation and began discussing the possibility of teaching machines to think. Their first project, the Logic Theorist, was a program that could prove mathematical theorems. They chose Bertrand Russell's and Alfred North Whitehead's Principia Mathematica as the focus and managed to get the program to solve 38 of the second chapter's 52 theorems - and the proof for theorem 2.85 was more elegant than that of Russell and Whitehead. The Logic Theorist was demonstrated at the Summer 1956 Dartmouth conference, the first conference on artificial intelligence, a name coined by John McCarthy specifically for the event. Hook & Norman Origins of Cyberspace 815.

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