11 Facts About Allen Newell

1.

Allen Newell was an American researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department of Psychology.

2.

Allen Newell contributed to the Information Processing Language and two of the earliest AI programs, the Logic Theory Machine and the General Problem Solver.

3.

Allen Newell was awarded the ACM's AM Turing Award along with Herbert A Simon in 1975 for their basic contributions to artificial intelligence and the psychology of human cognition.

4.

Allen Newell was a graduate student at Princeton University from 1949 to 1950, where he did mathematics.

5.

Allen Newell eventually earned his PhD from the now Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon with Herbert Simon serving as his advisor.

6.

Allen Newell was dissatisfied with the accuracy and validity of their findings produced from small-scale laboratory experiments.

7.

Allen Newell joined with fellow RAND teammates John Kennedy, Bob Chapman, and Bill Biel at an Air Force Early Warning Station to study organizational processes in flight crews.

8.

In September 1954, Allen Newell enrolled in a seminar where Oliver Selfridge "described a running computer program that learned to recognize letters and other patterns".

9.

Allen Newell's work came to the attention of economist Herbert A Simon, and, together with programmer J C Shaw, they developed the first true artificial intelligence program, the Logic Theorist.

10.

Allen Newell's inventions included: list processing, the most important programming paradigm used by AI ever since; the application of means-ends analysis to general reasoning ; and the use of heuristics to limit the search space.

11.

Allen Newell's work culminated in the development of a cognitive architecture known as Soar and his unified theory of cognition, published in 1990, but their improvement was the objective of his efforts up to his death.