The Logic Theory Machine (LT) has been described as “The First Artificial Intelligence Program” (Crevier, 1993). LT was a proto-computer-program developed at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California in 1955-56. It was designed by Herbert Simon, Allan Newell, and J. Clifford Shaw (hereafter “NSS”) to discover and construct proofs from Principia Mathematica. The RAND trio’s goal was to model human problem solving using an electronic computer, which they claimed to have accomplished with LT’s first successful operation in 1956. The purpose of this paper is to isolate the specific competencies used by NSS to justify comparisons between LT's abilities and those of a human being. This step serves to introduce the particular ways in which human nature had to be framed in order to match up neatly, by analogy, to the competencies of LT.
The structure of my paper is as follows. To begin, I introduce how Herbert Simon’s training in logical positivism under Rudolf Carnap at the University of Chicago in the 1930-40s shaped his view of the social sciences and, in turn, the design specifications of LT in the 1950s. In 1947, Simon published Administrative Behavior, an influential text designed to turn administration into a science using formalized linguistic and conceptual tools. I show how in 1955, NSS then translated these tools into a new medium—electronic computing—to formalize the adaptability of the human brain. The product, LT, served to formalize and legitimize the field of artificial intelligence.
