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Oral History Interview with Allen Newell An Interview with ALLEN NEWELL OH 227 Conducted by Arthur L. Norberg on 10-12 June 1991 Pittsburgh, PA Charles Babbage Institute Center for the History of Information Processing University of Minnesota, Minneapolis Copyright, Charles Babbage Institute 1 Allen Newell Interview 10-12 June 1991 Abstract Newell discusses his entry into computer science, funding for computer science departments and research, the development of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, and the growth of the computer science and artificial intelligence research communities. Newell describes his introduction to computers through his interest in organizational theory and work with Herb Simon and the Rand Corporation. He discusses early funding of university computer research through the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Mental Health. He recounts the creation of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) under J. C. R. Licklider. Newell recalls the formation of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon and the work of Alan J. Perlis and Raj Reddy. He describes the early funding initiatives of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and the work of Burt Green, Robert Cooper, and Joseph Traub. Newell discusses George Heilmeier's attempts to cut back artificial intelligence, especially speech recognition, research. He compares research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Computer Science Department with work done at Carnegie Mellon. Newell concludes the interview with a discussion of the creation of the ARPANET and a description of the involvement of the research community in influencing ARPA personnel and initiatives. 2 ALLEN NEWELL INTERVIEW DATE: 10 June 1991 INTERVIEWER: Arthur L. Norberg LOCATION: Pittsburgh, PA NORBERG: Can I ask you to briefly describe for me, as you understand it, the origins of this field in the 1950s? And the reason I am asking the question is I want to distinguish the various approaches and the reasons for their emergence. Why Carnegie Mellon is interested in complex information processing as a group; why the MIT people seem to be more oriented toward machinery, and so on. NEWELL: So this is the field of AI you're talking about. NORBERG: The field of AI. NEWELL: You will push me in a moment, but it's not clear that I can give you more than what has become a standard mythology on this, which is to say that from my point of view there is this highly personal and direct relationship between Herb Simon and myself, which starts out at Rand (it's been written about, so that's sort of available), in which we both start out as people concerned with psychology and behavior. Herb, of course, is professionally from that area. Me not, when you look at my background. Organizational research was concerned with psychology. I actually joined the American Psychological Association in 1952, so it goes way back. So I am, although a bunch of odd things in terms of education, I am really operating as a psychologist, and Herb, of course, is as well. So, in fact, that whole orientation is sort of absolutely there in simply the set of problems that Herb and I are dealing with. And when we come back to CIT [Carnegie Institute of Technology] - Herb is here anyway, but when I come back it is the same thing. Now, what brings me back to CIT is officially the issue of continuing these organization studies. And in fact, there was an immense amount of planning fantasy and all the rest of this about how we were going to create a... Do you know anything about the Systems Research Lab at all? Is that part of your world? There was an attempt to build a laboratory at Rand... more than an attempt... a real attempt to build a laboratory at Rand, where they did organizational studies in which groups worked for up to a month in air defense situations. And we thus had 20 to 30 3 people working continuously eight hours a day gathering massive amounts of data on their behavior, trying to understand that. It was out of that that SDC (System Development Corporation), systems training and the air defense command, and all that sort of stuff evolved. That's a whole big area and full of its own great ideas. So when I came back to work with Herb, who is deeply involved in organization theory, which in fact is the thing that brings us together, that is sort of the imagery that's going on between us. And so, there's lots of fantasies about how we're going go do that kind of organizational studies here, and so forth. The concern with individual behavior, the concern with trying to do something in terms of understanding reasoning and thinking and so forth, sort of grows up within that. It doesn't happen after I am here; it happens sort of in the process of coming here. And it happens again; there is this piece of true mythology about Oliver Selfridge coming out to Rand giving an afternoon seminar for the four of us, which just totally turned me on. And within the context of understanding the behavior of the tellers and the guys who draw on plexiboard, which I can't remember what they're called, that behavior was the behavior we were analyzing. So we were analyzing individual behavior within an organizational context, but then shifted therefore from the real organizational concerns to this issue of individuals. That was sort of going on after I was already interacting deeply with Herb and made the commitment to not go to the Center for Behavioral Sciences. So Casbaugh [?] was just getting started in his first year, and I made the choice. I was one of the so-called junior fellows. NORBERG: Where was the center? NEWELL: The center at Stanford, that now exists at Stanford [Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences]. This was its first year; 1955 was its first year. They have had a great stratified system, called senior fellows and junior fellows. Junior fellows were supposed to go sit at the seat of the senior fellows. I was one of the junior fellows. When push came to shove I decided I would rather go to work with Herb and came back into this environment with all of this organizational and social psychological and performance stuff uppermost. Although what I had been mostly concerned about was the computer technologies for building the simulated system. So I was sort of deep in that aspect and thus not deeply involved. NORBERG: Let me ask two questions about that, please. One of them is, this sounds to me like the interaction of 4 you and Herb Simon... NEWELL: Right. NORBERG: ... was a highly personalized... NEWELL: Sure, absolutely. NORBERG: ... thing, rather than a whole group of people who happened to be at CIT at the time. NEWELL: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. NORBERG: And the only connection then would be with a similar but not identical kind of activity going on in organizational studies and behavioral studies at Rand. Is that fair? NEWELL: Yes. Herb essentially is an organizational theorist. He is lots of things, but he is that. And so he found us at Rand. He was out there doing his thing as an economics consultant with the decision theory people. We were a bunch of peculiar characters off on one side doing these organizational studies. So he found us and was fascinated. He came over just to talk to all of us, and then he and I began to... So very personal, absolutely personal, the two of us. NORBERG: And my second question is how did you become interested in the computing machine side of this? NEWELL: I think the only answer to that is that as we cranked up... This is now actually before... Does the name by the name of Bavelas mean anything to you? Alex Bavelas was a psychologist; a mysterious psychologist because he never published, but was famously known all through psychology. He did a series of so-called task communication studies in which he put people in a room with partitions so they could only communicate by 5 messages, and so initiated a whole area of small group studies based on these task communications, where humans only communicated with little messages so you do task analyses. People at Rand got very interested in that. In fact, John Kennedy sort of came out to Rand because of Rand's electrical engineering department's (whatever it was called) interest in this. I got very interested in this. So I am sitting in the mathematics division, which is a free- floating division within Rand, famously so. Williams... a guy by the name of Jim... No, no... Anyway, famous guy, because he was not a Ph.D., an astronomer, worked at OSRD during the war, became the head of the mathematics department at Rand. And he had a habit, which he actually did on me, in which the day I walked in when I took my job out there, he said, "I have just bought all your time for the year. Here, I give it back to you. Now, go off and do something interesting." I mean, it was his standard... J.D. Williams... his standard thing. So I was floating around doing whatever I damned pleased. It was a hotbed of game theory. I turned out not to be terribly excited by game theory. And I got interested because of some of this other stuff, and some of the summer studies, in looking at small group behavior.
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