What was the name of the 1956 computer program that proved theorems in symbolic logic?

Logic Theorist was the 1956 computer program that proved theorems in symbolic logic.

Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon, and programmer J. C. Shaw developed Logic Theorist at the RAND Corporation. The program was designed to reproduce aspects of human problem-solving by searching for proofs in *Principia Mathematica*, the influential logic work by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell.

Logic Theorist successfully proved many of the theorems in the book’s second chapter, sometimes finding shorter proofs than the published versions. Its demonstration helped persuade researchers that computers could perform tasks involving symbolic reasoning rather than only numerical calculation.

The program is often described as the first artificial-intelligence program, although “first” depends on how AI software is defined. It was created around the time of the 1956 Dartmouth workshop, where the term artificial intelligence became established as the name of a research field. Logic Theorist also influenced later work on general problem-solving systems.