Edward Feigenbaum

In May 2013, Edward Feigenbaum, Kumagai Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, came to the IEEE Computer Society offices to talk about his career as one of the leaders of artificial intelligence. For his work in the field, Feigenbaum had just received the Computer Society’s 2013 Pioneer Award. In this interview, part of which is printed here, we talked about his career, his mentor Herbert Simon, and the development of AI.

Feigenbaum is not only one of the founders of the field of AI. He has been one of its leaders for more than 50 years. He became aware of the birth of AI when he was an undergraduate at Carnegie Tech (later, Carnegie Mellon University). Continuing to graduate school there, he was mentored by Herbert Simon, and he also collaborated with Allen Newell. In 1960, he took his first academic job at the University of California at Berkeley. There he coedited an important anthology of early AI research, Computers and Thought (McGraw-Hill, 1963), which is often called “AI’s first book.”

Computer and Thought book cover, circa 1963.

In 1965, he moved to Stanford University’s new Computer Science Department. There he began a collaboration with Nobel laureate geneticist Joshua Lederberg, chemist Carl Djerassi, and Bruce Buchanan on work that reshaped the paradigm of AI—expert systems, knowledge engineering methods, and the concepts of knowledge-based systems.

From 1965–1968, he led Stanford’s Computer Center. The early 1980s was a busy time for him. He studied and wrote widely about Japan’s Fifth Generation Project, which attempted to marry AI with high-speed computing; helped to found the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI); served as AAAI’s second president; and led and coedited the landmark four-volume Handbook of Artificial Intelligence (Addison-Wesley).

In the 1990s, he turned to public service, serving at the Pentagon as chief scientist of the Air Force from 1994–1997.

We began our discussions by talking about the time when Herbert Simon introduced him to the ideas of a “thinking machine.”

David Alan Grier:

Let’s begin by talking about the start of your career. How did you first get interested in computing?

Feigenbaum:

As a undergraduate senior in the fall of 1955–1956 at Carnegie Tech, I took a graduate-level seminar called “Mathematical models in the Social Sciences” from Herbert Simon—polymath, social scientist, behavioral scientist, later Nobel Prize winner in economics, and cofounder of AI.

In the first seminar session after the Christmas and New Year’s holiday break, January 1956, Herb opened the seminar by reporting, “Over the Christmas holiday, Allen Newell and I invented a thinking machine.” This comment startled us six students. What did that mean? Thinking? Machine? Those words did not seem to go together.

What Simon was talking about the first fully working AI program. It was named LT, the Logic Theory program. AI scientists know this program as the first heuristic search problem-solving program. It proved theorems (the propositional calculus) in chapter 2 of Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica (three volumes, 1910–1913).

To allow the six of us to understand computing machines, Simon gave us copies of the IBM 701 manual. I took that manual home with me and read it straight through the night. By morning, I was a born-again computer scientist, except there was no such phrase then as “computer scientist.”

I knew two things: I was going to go into this field involving AI and computers, and I was going to come back to Carnegie Tech for graduate school to work with Herb Simon, and Al Newell, on these problems.

Fortunately for me, I was able to attend a graduate student program on computers that summer, 1956, held by IBM—their first such summer program. IBM staff taught me programming for the IBM 650 (which Carnegie Tech was about to acquire) and the new IBM 704.

When I returned to Carnegie, I walked into Herb Simon’s office and said, “Okay, here I am. What do I do?” Having cracked open the issue of computer simulation of...