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Allen Newell

Portrait of Allen Newell
Photo: 1958 chess match with Herbert Simon (right). Public Domain (US) / CC BY-SA 2.0

1927 to 1992, USA · Cognitive scientist; co-founder of artificial intelligence and cognitive science

Also known as: Allen Newell

Allen Newell, with Herbert Simon, founded the symbolic-AI tradition and shaped cognitive science in its first decades. The Newell-Simon collaboration produced the Logic Theorist (1956), the General Problem Solver (1959), and a long series of papers on problem-solving, expertise and production-system architectures.

In the 1980s Newell joined Card and Moran at Xerox PARC for the work that became The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction, applying his architectural style of cognitive modelling to the design of interactive systems. His final book, Unified Theories of Cognition (1990), proposed Soar as a candidate unified architecture, an ambition that continues to motivate cognitive-architecture research. He won the ACM Turing Award with Simon in 1975 for "their joint scientific efforts in artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing".

Related people: Herbert Simon, Stuart Card, Thomas Moran

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