ABSTRACT
The concept of the general problem solver has always served as a kind of metaphor for the field of Artificial Intelligence. The search for general mechanisms underlying intelligence is surely what AI is about and the writing of programs that apply general mechanisms to specific new problems has always been viewed as the ultimate in AI. Embodied within this view of AI is the general conception of a computer as an answer-giving device. That is, the computer-based view of the world is that you present a problem to the computer and it gives you the answer. The AI part of that view is that while number crunching computers will give arithmetic answers to arithmetic problems, an AI computer would give verbal answers to verbal problems. So, intelligent computers would be ones which, armed with their general problem solver, would take any problem and find the answer.
