ABSTRACT
In January 1956, Herbert Simon, Nobel laureate for economics (1978), told his students that over the Christmas break, he and his colleague Al Newell had developed a computer program that could do simple logic problems on what he termed “a thinking machine” (Brynjolfsson & McAffee, 2014). He spent the next several years developing computer programs that could solve more sophisticated problems and play games. In 1958, he predicted that a digital computer would be the world chess champion by 1968 (Crevier, 1993). Simon was right about the computer chess champion, but off by about thirty years. In 1997, an IBM computer named Deep Blue beat the world chess champion, Gary Kasparov. Ten years later, chess programs comparable to the one on Deep Blue were running on ordinary personal computers and laptops.
