Artificial intelligence · 1956

Logic Theorist

The first program built to reason: it proves 38 theorems of Principia Mathematica.

Allen Newell, Herbert Simon and Cliff Shaw wrote Logic Theorist in 1955-56, running on RAND's JOHNNIAC. It proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in chapter 2 of Principia Mathematica, one more elegantly than the original. It introduced heuristic search and list processing.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 3

Turing test 1950
Predicate logic 1879
Boolean logic 1854

What it led to 2

Dartmouth AI workshop 1956
General Problem Solver 1959

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Training compute of notable AI models Source: Epoch AI, Notable AI Models (CC BY 4.0)

Computation per constant dollar, 1850-2006 Latest: 7.3B million units of computer power per 2006 $ (2003) Source: Nordhaus 2007, Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing, J. Econ. Hist. 67(1), Table 6