01 · A life in computing
The person behind the work
Herbert Simon brought the study of human decision-making into early artificial intelligence. With Allen Newell and collaborators, he used programs such as the Logic Theorist to investigate how people solve problems through symbolic search. His broader research examined organizations and bounded rationality: decisions made with limited information and resources. At Carnegie Mellon, his work connected computer science with psychology, economics, and management.
The contribution, explained
Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, working with J. C. Shaw and others, built programs that represented problems symbolically and searched through possible solutions. Their research connected artificial intelligence with cognitive psychology and helped develop list processing. A computer program could serve both as a problem solver and as an explicit hypothesis about a process of thought.
Why it matters
Heuristic search made some large problem spaces tractable and gave cognitive theories a form that could be tested.