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We wish to acknowledge the helpful suggestions and encouragement of Herbert Simon, Edward Feigenbaum, Julian Feldman, Frank Marzocco, and Charles Baker. Thanks are also due the Committee on Simulation of Cognitive Processes of the Social Science. Use the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues.

Report #SP-1395, System Development Corporation, Santa Monica, CA.

In A. C. Hoggatt and F. E. Balderston (Eds.), Symposium on simulation models: Methodology and applications to the behavioral sciences. Cincinnati: South-Western Publishing, 111-138.

This paper describes a trial-and-error device which learns to play the game of Noughts and Crosses. It was initially constructed from matchboxes and coloured beads and subsequently simulated in essentials by a program for a Pegasus 2 computer. The parameters governing the adaptive behaviour of this automaton are described and preliminary observations on its performance are briefly reported.

A large high-speed general-purpose digital computer (IBM 7090) wasProgrammed to solve elementary symbolic integration problems at approximatelythe level of a good college freshman. The program is called SAINT,an acronym for "Symbolic Automatic INTegrator." The SAINT programis written in LISP (McCarthy, 1960), and most of the work reported hereJs the substance of a doctoral dissertation at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology (Slagle, 1961). This discussion concerns the SAINT programand its performance.Some typical samples of SAINT's external behavior are given so thatthe reader may think in concrete terms. Journal of the ACM, Vol 10, No. 4, pp. 507-520, October 1963.

A statement in a spoken language may be regarded as a one-dimensional string of symbols used to communicate an idea from the speaker to a listener. The dimensionality of the statement is limited by the need for presenting words in a single time sequence. However, evidence indicates that most information and ideas are not stored by people in one-dimensional arrays isomorphic to these linear strings. This implies that a speaker must use certain complex information manipulating processes to transform the stored information to a linear output string, and that a listener, in order to "understand" the speaker, must use another set of processes to decode this linear string. In order for communication to take place, the information map of both the listener and the speaker must be approximately the same, at least for the universe of discourse.

"The LISP language is designed primarily for symbolic data processing. It has been used for symbolic calculations in differential and integral calculus, electrical circuit theory, mathematical logic, game playing, and other fields of artificial intelligence.LISP is a formal mathematical language. It is therefore podsible to give a concise yet complete description of it. Such is the purpose of this first section of the manual. Other sections will describe ways of using LISP to advantage and will explain extensions of the language which make it a convenient programming system."The M.I.T. Press

"This report describes some experiments in constructing a compiler that makes use of heuristic problem~solving techniques such as those incorporated in the General Problem Solver (GPS). The experiments were aimed at the dual objectives of throwing light on some of the problems of constructing more powerful programming languages and compilers, and of testing whether the task of writing a computer program can be regarded as a "problem" in the sense in which that term is used in GPS. The present paper is concerned primarily with the second objective--with analyzing some of the problem-solving processes that are involved in writing computer programs. At the present stage of their development, no claims will be made for the heuristic programming procedures described here as practical approaches to the construction of compilers. Their interest lies in what they teach us about the nature of the programming task." JACM, 10, 493-506. See also: Artificial intelligence and self-organizing systems: Experiments with a Heuristic Compiler. (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=806076)

Article based on Ph.D. dissertation at Carnegie Tech. "... the problem of meaning is of major importance in the study of the nature of intelligence, and that a useful definition of meaning must include not only denotation but connotation and implication as well. To handle these important questions it is necessary to study cognitive organizations which are more complex than those upon which most psychological theories are based. A central question is the storage of large numbers of interrelated propositions in a manner which efficiently uses memory capacity." In E.A. Feigenbaum & J. Feldman (Eds.) Computers and Thought, pp. 217-233. McGraw-Hill, 1963.