The First AIs: IPL-V and Simon&Newell's 1950s (!!) Cognitive Models

For almost exactly a year now, since Team ELIZA got the original ELIZA working, and the book became the team's primary focus, I've been working on reanimating the very first AIs, specifically those written in IPL-V (Information Processing Language Five*) in the 1950s at RAND and Carnegie Tech (now CMU). Mark (Marino) suggested that I open a discussion about some of these earliest IPL-V AIs in this CCS session, and I'm looking for either encouragement or discouragement.

The problem is that, although IPL-V is an incredibly important language, being the language in which Simon and Newell implemented the world's first AIs**, it's also a very difficult language, being essentially the assembly language for a Lisp machine (although Lisp itself wasn't invented until a decade later than the earliest IPL work!) I've made a little video introduction to IPL-V:

If you aren't bored by it, or scared by (or scarred by) all this, let me know, either herebelow, or in DM, and I'll consider making the promised next video introducing LT (The Logic Theory machine, aka. The Logic Theorist) and maybe GPS (The General Problem Solver).

Cheers,
'Jeff

ps. Here's a video that I made about 6 months ago that summarizes my progress at that time on reanimating LT:

Since then my efforts have regressed! :-) Why that has happened is a long, perhaps semi-interesting story.)

(* The fifth IPL is the only one that was fully implemented and commonly available. Most of the previous ones were internal to RAND/CIT. There were plans for an IPL-VI, but it was rolled by Lisp, which implements all the same concepts in a much more elegant language.)

(** What Simon and Newell were working on at RAND in IPL-V wasn't primarily AI, but rather cognitive models; their goal was to build computer programs that thought in the same way that humans thought. To the extent that they succeeded at this, they would have incidentally built an AI by definition, but Simon and Newell preferred terms like "complex information processing" or "cognitive simulation" over "artificial intelligence," which was coined by McCarthy for the 1956 Dartmouth conference. This reflected a genuine philosophical difference: McCarthy pursued intelligence by any effective means, while Simon and Newell insisted their programs should mirror actual human cognitive processes.)