The Logic Theory Machine Alive

Written at RAND and Carnegie Tech, the Logic Theorist proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in Principia Mathematica — one proof more elegant than Russell and Whitehead's own. Simon later called it 'the first program deliberately engineered to perform intelligent problem-solving.'

To write it, Newell and Simon invented IPL, a list-processing language for machines that had none — introducing the linked list itself as a programming structure. The work was presented at the 1956 Dartmouth conference where the field got its name.