[MLUG - DISCUSSION] One of the great kings of all geeks dies at 84

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

His Nobel Prize was in Economics, but Herb Simon was one of the great
promoters of computing and artificial intelligence.  Here's his web page
at CMU:  http://www.psy.cmu.edu/psy/faculty/hsimon/hsimon.html

Here's a talk he gave on the future of computing at the Newell-Simon Hall
Inauguration and Earthware Symposium:
http://wean1.ulib.org/cgi-bin/metawin-lectures.pl?target=Lectures/Symposia
(Apologies for the MS file formats!!)

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N.Y. Times
February 10, 2001

Herbert A. Simon, Nobel Winner for Economics, Dies at 84

By PAUL LEWIS

Herbert A. Simon, an American polymath who won the Nobel in economics in
1978 with a new theory of decision making and who helped pioneer the idea
that computers can exhibit artificial intelligence that mirrors human
thinking, died yesterday. He was 84.

He died at the Presbyterian University Hospital of Pittsburgh, according
to an announcement by Carnegie Mellon University, which said the cause was
complications after surgery last month. Mr. Simon was the Richard King
Mellon University Professor of Computer Science and Psychology at the
university a title that underscored the breadth of his interests and
learning.

Mr. Simon also won the A. M. Turing Award for his work on computer science
in 1975 and the National Medal of Science in 1986. In 1993, he was awarded
the American Psychological Association's award for outstanding lifetime
contributions to psychology.

In 1994, he became one of only 14 foreign scientists ever to be inducted
into the Chinese Academy of Sciences and in 1995 was given awards by the
International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence and the
American Society of Public Administration.

Awarding him the Nobel, the Swedish Academy of Sciences cited "his
pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic
organizations" and acknowledged that "modern business economics and
administrative research are largely based on Simon's ideas."

Professor Simon challenged the classical economic theory that economic
behavior was essentially rational behavior in which decisions were made on
the basis of all available information with a view to securing the optimum
result possible for each decision maker.

Instead, Professor Simon contended that in today's complex world
individuals cannot possibly process or even obtain all the information
they need to make fully rational decisions. Rather, they try to make
decisions that are good enough and that represent reasonable or acceptable
outcomes.

He called this less ambitious view of human decision making "bounded
rationality" or "intended rational behavior" and described the results it
brought as "satisficing."

In his book "Administrative Behavior" he set out the implications of this
approach, rejecting the notion of an omniscient "economic man" capable of
making decisions that bring the greatest benefit possible and substituting
instead the idea of "administrative man" who "satisfices looks for a
course of action that is satisfactory or `good enough.' "

Professor Simon's interest in decision making led him logically into the
fields of computer science, psychology and political science. His belief
that human decisions were made within clear constraints seemed to conform
with the way that computers are programmed to resolve problems with
defined parameters.

In the mid-1950's, he teamed up with Allen Newell of the Rand Corporation
to study human decision making by trying to simulate it on computers,
using a strategy he called thinking aloud.

People were asked for the general reasoning processes they went through as
they solved logical problems and these were then converted into computer
programs that Professor Simon and Mr. Newell thought equipped these
machines with a kind of artificial intelligence that enabled them to
simulate human thought rather than just perform stereotyped procedures.

The breakthrough came in December 1955 when Professor Simon and his
colleague succeeded in writing a computer program that could prove
mathematical theorems taken from the Bertrand Russell and Alfred North
Whitehead classic on mathematical logic, "Principia Mathematica."

The following January, Professor Simon celebrated this discovery by
walking into a class and announcing to his students, "Over the Christmas
holiday, Al Newell and I invented a thinking machine."

A subsequent letter to Lord Russell explaining his achievement elicited
the reply: "I am delighted to know that `Principia Mathematica' can now be
done by machinery. I wish Whitehead and I had known of this possibility
before we wasted 10 years doing it by hand."

But in a much-cited 1957 paper Professor Simon seemed to allow his own
enthusiasm for artificial intelligence to run too far ahead of its more
realistic possibilities. Within 10 years, he predicted, "a digital
computer will be the world's chess champion unless the rules bar it from
competition," while within the "visible future," he said, "machines that
think, that learn and that create" will be able to handle challenges
"coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied."

Sure enough, the I.B.M computer Deep Blue did finally beat the world chess
champion Gary Kasparov last year about three decades after Mr.  Simon had
predicted the event would occur.

Because artificial intelligence has not grown as quickly or as strongly as
Professor Simon hoped, critics of his thinking argue that there are limits
to what computers can achieve and that what they accomplish will always be
a simulation of human thought, not creative thinking itself. As a result,
Professor Simon's achievements have sparked a passionate and continuing
debate about the differences between people and thinking machines.

Born on June 15, 1916, the son of German immigrants, in Milwaukee, Herbert
A. Simon attended public school and entered the University of Chicago in
1933 with the intention of bringing the same rigorous methodology to the
social sciences as existed in physics and other "hard" sciences.

As an undergraduate his interest in decision making was aroused when he
made a field study of Milwaukee's recreation department. After receiving
his bachelor's degree in 1936 he became an assistant to Clarence E. Ridley
of the International City Managers Association and then continued work on
administrative techniques in the Bureau of Public Administration of the
University of California at Berkeley.

In 1942, he moved to the Illinois Institute of Technology and in 1943
received his doctorate from the University of Chicago for a dissertation
subsequently published in 1947 as "Administrative Behavior: A Study of
Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organizations."

In 1937, he married Dorothea Pye, who survives him along with three
children, Katherine Simon Frank of Minneapolis; Peter A. Simon of Bryan,
Tex.; and Barbara M. Simon of Wilder, Vt.; six grandchildren, three
step-grandchildren; and five great- grandchildren.

A member of the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University since 1949,
Professor Simon played important roles in the formation of several
departments and schools including the Graduate School of Industrial
Administration, the School of Computer Science and the College of
Humanities and Social Sciences' psychology department.

He published 27 books, of which the best known today are "Models of
Bounded Rationality" (1997), "Sciences of the Artificial"(1996) and
"Administrative Behavior"(1997).

In 1991 he published his autobiography, "Models of My Life," and remarked
then about his vision of that all-vanquishing computer hunched over the
chess boards of the world: "I still feel good about my prediction. Only
the time frame was a bit short." And so it was.


Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

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