Allen Newell (1927-1992) was an American computer scientist and cognitive psychologist regarded as one of the founders of artificial intelligence. Working first at the RAND Corporation and then at Carnegie Mellon University, he sought throughout his career to understand human thinking by building computer programs that reproduced it, helping to create both artificial intelligence and the field of cognitive science.
With Herbert Simon and the programmer Cliff Shaw, Newell built the Logic Theorist in 1956, widely considered the first AI program, and followed it with the General Problem Solver. With Simon he articulated the physical symbol system hypothesis, the claim that manipulating symbols is the essence of intelligence, which they laid out in their 1975 ACM Turing Award lecture, “Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search,” archived in his papers at Carnegie Mellon. Newell and Simon shared the 1975 Turing Award, computing’s highest honor, for their contributions to AI, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing.
Newell’s influence extended well beyond any single program. He helped build Carnegie Mellon into one of the world’s leading computer science institutions, and near the end of his life he set out a sweeping theory of cognition called Soar, an attempt at a “unified theory” of how the mind works. His insistence that intelligence could be studied as an empirical science shaped generations of researchers.
Why business readers should care: Newell helped define what AI even means, and the symbolic, rule-based tradition he championed underpinned the expert systems that businesses first adopted. His work is the intellectual root of the idea that human expertise can be captured and reproduced by a machine.