Javier Poveda Figueroa, Independent researcher, "The dispute between Herbert Simon and Hao Wang concerning the future of artificial intelligence during the Cold War"
During the 1960s, political scientist Herbert Simon and philosopher Hao Wang entered into a scientific dispute concerning automatic theorem proving. While Simon defended the concept of heuristics for proving mathematical logic theorems, Wang said that Simon’s approach was insufficient because heuristics had limitations. Instead, Wang suggested using Herbrand’s theorem as an approach to prove them efficiently. Wang was correct because his approach solved all mathematical logic theorems in Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica (1910-1913), while Simon’s could just solve 38.
Even though Wang obtained better results than Simon’s, the artificial intelligence community ignored his contribution. Why Wang’s approach to proving mathematical logic theorems was not considered by the artificial intelligence community? One of the answers may lie in the tense relations between China and the USA during the Cold War.
Using the “entangled history” approach, I suggest that Simon and Wang’s dispute can be framed in the project of modernization of China, and the ideological dispute between capitalism and socialism blocks during the Cold War.
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