Allen Newell

American researcher at RAND and later Carnegie Mellon, where he co-founded the computer science department. With Herbert Simon and Cliff Shaw he wrote Logic Theorist in 1956 and then the General Problem Solver, which separated the description of a problem from the strategy for solving it — a split that became the basic pattern of symbolic AI.

Newell pressed the thesis that cognition should be modelled as a physical symbol system and that theories must be implemented before they can be tested. His final project, the cognitive architecture Soar, was an attempt at a unified theory of cognition rather than another specialised program. Turing Award 1975, shared with Simon.