Summary of 'Programs With Common Sense' (1959) by John McCarthy

In 1959, John McCarthy noted that while interesting work was being done to solve problems requiring a high level of human intelligence, many simpler verbal reasoning processes had not yet been implemented using machines. Taking inspiration from the field of formal logic which dates back to Aristotle (384–322 BC), McCarthy sought to design a machine with "common sense". He proposed a program, named the Advice Taker, that could draw conclusions and improve from a set of premises ("advice") defined in a formal language. Unlike previous research on the subject [1], McCarthy wished to describe the program's procedures and heuristics in rich detail. The motivation behind this approach was to create a machine with the ability to learn from experience as effectively as humans do and enable discovery of abstract concepts through relatively simple representations.