GPS, the General Problem Solver

An early ArtificialIntelligence program described in the paper "GPS, a Program That Simulates Human Thought" by Alan Newell and Herbert A. Simon. 

In chapter four of his book ParadigmsOfArtificialIntelligenceProgramming PeterNorvig describes the algorithm and gives an implementation in CommonLisp (available from http://www.norvig.com/paip/README.html). He then goes on to list many reasons why the General Problem Solver is not as general as it might appear at first contact (e.g. the SussmanAnomaly).

See http://www.math.grin.edu/~stone/events/scheme-workshop/gps.html for a documented SchemeLanguage implementation of the algorithm.

In his famous 1976 essay "ArtificialIntelligenceMeetsNaturalStupidity" DrewMcDermott remarks: "By now, `GPS' is a colorless term denoting a particularly stupid program to solve puzzles. But it originally meant `General Problem Solver', which caused everybody a lot of needless excitement and distraction. It should have been called LFGNS - `Local-Feature-Guided Network Searcher.'"

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CategoryArtificialIntelligence