Saul Amarel, 74, an Innovator In the Artificial Intelligence Field

Dr. Saul Amarel, who helped develop the field of artificial intelligence and founded the computer science department at Rutgers University, died on Wednesday in Princeton, N.J., where he lived. The cause was complications of cancer, according to Rutgers. At Rutgers, Dr. Amarel developed computer time-sharing, and his laboratory became an early node on Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet. He took a leave in the 1980's to spend a few years directing a computer science program at the Pentagon, and returned to Rutgers in 1988. Among his peers, Dr. Amarel was perhaps best known for a paper he wrote in 1968, which put him at the vanguard of the artificial intelligence movement.