Although early pioneers such as Turing had emphasized the importance of teaching a
machine as one might a child (i.e., emphasizing AI as a learning process), the “symbol
processing hypothesis” (Newell, Shaw, and Simon, 1958; Newell and Simon, 1976) was
premised on the attempt to replicate the logical flow of human decision making through
processing symbols. Early attempts to instantiate this approach yielded striking success in
demonstration projects, such as the ability of a computer to navigate elements of a chess game
(or other board games) or engage in relatively simple conversations with humans by following
specific heuristics and rules embedded into a program. However, while research based on the
concept of a “general problem solver” has continued to be an area of significant academic
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