Which 1956 program is widely regarded as the first artificial intelligence program?

The 1956 Logic Theorist is widely regarded as the first artificial intelligence program.

Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon, and Cliff Shaw developed it to imitate human problem-solving in symbolic logic. The program could prove many theorems from Principia Mathematica, sometimes finding shorter proofs than those published by the authors.

Logic Theorist was created during the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, the meeting that helped establish AI as a distinct research field. It used rules and heuristic search rather than neural networks or statistical learning.

A common mix-up is confusing Logic Theorist with the General Problem Solver. General Problem Solver came later, in 1957, and was a broader symbolic problem-solving system. Logic Theorist’s importance comes from its early demonstration that a computer could perform a task associated with mathematical reasoning.