THE THINKING MACHINE

The concept of artificial intelligence might seem like a modern-day technological venture, but the first piece of technology that was comparable to human intelligence was created in 1956 by computer pioneers Herbert A. Simon and Allen Newell. Also known as the ‘thinking machine’, the Logic Theorist was a computer program to solve mathematical statements laid out in a collection of foundational mathematics books called Principia Mathematica, written by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. Of the 52 statements or theorems in the books, the Logic Theorist proved 38 of them and even offered a more in-depth answer to one theorem than that put forward by its creators.