Long before chatbots, image generators, or AI music composers, there was a single, humble program that started it all. Meet Logic Theorist (1956) — widely considered the first true AI program. Its goal? Solve mathematical theorems automatically. Simple, right? Well… not quite.
Created by Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon, Logic Theorist wasn’t flashy. It didn’t have a personality, make jokes, or predict the stock market. But it could prove 38 of 52 theorems from Principia Mathematica — a groundbreaking achievement at the time. Computers back then were huge, slow, and clunky. Watching Logic Theorist work was like witnessing a digital brain taking its first steps.
The program worked by reasoning symbolically, which became the foundation for future AI research. Every chatbot, every recommendation engine, and yes, even the AI generating this article, owes a tiny bit of existence to that first experiment.
There were plenty of quirks. Logic Theorist sometimes “struggled” with proofs that humans found trivial. But that’s the charm — it was learning, exploring, and pioneering in a way no machine had ever done before. A reminder that even the mightiest AI giants of today started with humble, quirky beginnings.
