The First Artificial Intelligence Program (July 1956)

At the 1956 Dartmouth summer session on artificial intelligence, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon demonstrated the first AI program, the Logic Theorist, to find the basic equations of logic as defined in Principia Mathematica by Whitehead and Russell.

For one of the equations, the Logic Theorist surpassed its inventors’ expectations by finding a new and better proof. This was the “the first foray by artificial intelligence research into high-order intellectual processes” (Feigenbaum and Feldman, Computers and Thought [1963]).