Biographical Memoirs Volume 71 (1997) / Chapter Skim
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ALLEN NEWELL
ALLEN NEWELL
Pages 141-174
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Allen Newell chose for his life's work answering the fourth of these questions. He was a person who not only dreamt but gave bocly to his ciream, brought it to life.
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THE CAREER In a remarkable talk about his research strategies and history given at Carnegie Mellon University in December 1991, seven months before his death,2 Allen described his career as aimed single-mindedly at understanding the human mind, but he also confessed to four or five substantial diversions from that goal almost all of which produced major scientific products of their own. These "diversions" included his work with Gordon Bell on computer hardware architectures, the work with Stu Card and Tom Moran on the psychology of human-computer interaction, a major advisory role in the ARPA program of research on speech recognition, and his leadership in establishing computer - .
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Allen acquirer! a love of the mountains that never left him (an early ambition was to become a forest ranger)
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Navy ship that carrier! scientific observers to the Bikini nuclear tests en c!
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en c! Formulating Precise Concepts in Organization Theory kI9511)
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Now two of the preconditions were in place for Allen's move to the goal of understanding human thinking. He clearly saw information processing as a central activity in organizations, and he had had a first experience in symbolic computing.
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about computers (inclucling their symbolic capabilities) , about heuristic, about information processing in organizations, about cybernetics, en c!
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When the paper was presented in March 1955 at the Western Joint Computer Conference, Walter Pitts, the commentator for the session, said, "But, whereas The authors of the other papers] are imitating the nervous system, Mr.
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Work was pursues! simultaneously on a programming language that would be adequate for implementing the design, leacling to the invention of the Information Processing Languages (IPLs)
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The logic theory machine is part of a program of research to understand complex information processing systems by specifying and synthesizing a substantial variety of such systems for empirical study" (Newell and Simon, 1956~.3 It is all there: complex information processing, symbolic computation, heuristic methods, human problem solving, a programming language, empirical exploration. These are the components ot the fundamental research strategy ot the Carnegie-RAND group in 1955 and 1956 that continued to guide Allen Newell's scientific work throughout his career.
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up by LTM en c! the IPL programming languages.
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THE INFORMATION PROCESSING LANGUAGES (IPLS) The IPL languages in artificial intelligence en c!
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so] ." Completely general programming languages can be constructor!
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achieve intelligent behavior in a complex task. HUMAN PROBLEM SOLVING With the completion of LTM, GPS, the list-processing languages and production systems, and NSS, Al, Cliff, and I began more en c!
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generality en c! the realization of these properties in the programming languages the group invented!
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en c! "A Universal Weak Method" (with I
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with program organization wouic! become interested in computer hardware architectures, en c!
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user interface. In 1972, in connection with an AI workshop that we organized, Newell, Robertson, and McCracken built a pioneering hierarchical menu system that gave the workshop par
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from ARPA's interest in the possibility of launching a program in automatic speech recognition. Specifically because he was not an active speech researcher en c!
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theoretical framework. In his final book, Unified Theories of Cognition (1990)
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power law, en c! a universal weak methoc!
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to know whether to classify the time Allen spent as a citizen of the university en c! of the wicler science community as one of his diversions or as part of the mainstream of his scientific work.
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With Bert Green, then chairman of the psychology department, Allen was instrumental in obtaining the first large, continuing NIMH research grant for cognitive science research in that department. He was a principal figure, initialIv alone with Alan Perlis.
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A very large slice of Allen's life was spent preparing research proposals en c! budget defenses for computer science at Carnegie Mellon, as well as participating in ARPA planning exercises en c!
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thereby provide theoretical explanations for human thought processes. Every possible waking moment was to be reserves!
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Thinking big has characterized Al's whole research career, not thinking big for bigness' sake, but thinking as big as the task invites. From our earliest collaborations, A1 has kept atrocious working hours.
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on me." An c! much later, from a graduate student: "Allen Newell was not my aciviser .
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It is fitting to conclucle this account with a selection from Allen Newell's own set of maxims for the cleclicatec! scientist, proposed in his "Desires and Diversions" talk of December 1991, for these maxims describe his own life: To each scientific life, its own style; and each style defines a life.
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Technical Report, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Berkeley, E
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Technical report, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Laird, T., and P
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1956. The logic theory machine: A complex information processing system.
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1993. Allen Newell: The entry into complex information processing.
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