Herbert A. Simon, Nobel Winner for Economics, Dies at 84

February 10, 2001

By PAUL LEWIS

Herbert A. Simon, an American polymath who won the Nobel in economics
in 1978 with a new theory of decision making and who helped pioneer
the idea that computers can exhibit artificial intelligence that
mirrors human thinking, died yesterday. He was 84.

He died at the Presbyterian University Hospital of Pittsburgh,
according to an announcement by Carnegie Mellon University, which
said the cause was complications after surgery last month. Mr.
Simon was the Richard King Mellon University Professor of Computer
Science and Psychology at the university -- a title that underscored
the breadth of his interests and learning.

Mr. Simon also won the A. M. Turing Award for his work on computer
science in 1975 and the National Medal of Science in 1986. In 1993,
he was awarded the American Psychological Association's award for
outstanding lifetime contributions to psychology.

In 1994, he became one of only 14 foreign scientists ever to be
inducted into the Chinese Academy of Sciences and in 1995 was given
awards by the International Joint Conferences on Artificial
Intelligence and the American Society of Public Administration.

Awarding him the Nobel, the Swedish Academy of Sciences cited "his
pioneering research into the decision-making process within
economic organizations" and acknowledged that "modern business
economics and administrative research are largely based on Simon's
ideas."

Professor Simon challenged the classical economic theory that
economic behavior was essentially rational behavior in which
decisions were made on the basis of all available information with
a view to securing the optimum result possible for each decision
maker.

Instead, Professor Simon contended that in today's complex world
individuals cannot possibly process or even obtain all the
information they need to make fully rational decisions. Rather,
they try to make decisions that are good enough and that represent
reasonable or acceptable outcomes.

He called this less ambitious view of human decision making
"bounded rationality" or "intended rational behavior" and described
the results it brought as "satisficing."

In his book "Administrative Behavior" he set out the implications
of this approach, rejecting the notion of an omniscient "economic
man" capable of making decisions that bring the greatest benefit
possible and substituting instead the idea of "administrative man"
who "satisfices -- looks for a course of action that is satisfactory
or `good enough.' "

Professor Simon's interest in decision making led him logically
into the fields of computer science, psychology and political
science. His belief that human decisions were made within clear
constraints seemed to conform with the way that computers are
programmed to resolve problems with defined parameters.

In the mid-1950's, he teamed up with Allen Newell of the Rand
Corporation to study human decision making by trying to simulate it
on computers, using a strategy he called thinking aloud.

People were asked for the general reasoning processes they went
through as they solved logical problems and these were then
converted into computer programs that Professor Simon and Mr.
Newell thought equipped these machines with a kind of artificial
intelligence that enabled them to simulate human thought rather
than just perform stereotyped procedures.

The breakthrough came in December 1955 when Professor Simon and
his colleague succeeded in writing a computer program that could
prove mathematical theorems taken from the Bertrand Russell and
Alfred North Whitehead classic on mathematical logic, "Principia
Mathematica."

The following January, Professor Simon celebrated this discovery
by walking into a class and announcing to his students, "Over the
Christmas holiday, Al Newell and I invented a thinking machine."

A subsequent letter to Lord Russell explaining his achievement
elicited the reply: "I am delighted to know that 'Principia
Mathematica' can now be done by machinery. I wish Whitehead and I
had known of this possibility before we wasted 10 years doing it by
hand."

But in a much-cited 1957 paper Professor Simon seemed to allow his
own enthusiasm for artificial intelligence to run too far ahead of
its more realistic possibilities. Within 10 years, he predicted, "a
digital computer will be the world's chess champion unless the
rules bar it from competition," while within the "visible future,"
he said, "machines that think, that learn and that create" will be
able to handle challenges "coextensive with the range to which the
human mind has been applied."

Sure enough, the I.B.M computer Deep Blue did finally beat the
world chess champion Gary Kasparov last year -- about three decades
after Mr. Simon had predicted the event would occur.

Because artificial intelligence has not grown as quickly or as
strongly as Professor Simon hoped, critics of his thinking argue
that there are limits to what computers can achieve and that what
they accomplish will always be a simulation of human thought, not
creative thinking itself. As a result, Professor Simon's
achievements have sparked a passionate and continuing debate about
the differences between people and thinking machines.

Born on June 15, 1916, the son of German immigrants, in Milwaukee,
Herbert A. Simon attended public school and entered the University
of Chicago in 1933 with the intention of bringing the same rigorous
methodology to the social sciences as existed in physics and other
"hard" sciences.

As an undergraduate his interest in decision making was aroused
when he made a field study of Milwaukee's recreation department.
After receiving his bachelor's degree in 1936 he became an
assistant to Clarence E. Ridley of the International City Managers
Association and then continued work on administrative techniques in
the Bureau of Public Administration of the University of California
at Berkeley.

In 1942, he moved to the Illinois Institute of Technology and in
1943 received his doctorate from the University of Chicago for a
dissertation subsequently published in 1947 as "Administrative
Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative
Organizations."

In 1937, he married Dorothea Pye, who survives him along with
three children, Katherine Simon Frank of Minneapolis; Peter A.
Simon of Bryan, Tex.; and Barbara M. Simon of Wilder, Vt.; six
grandchildren, three step-grandchildren; and five great-
grandchildren.

A member of the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University since 1949,
Professor Simon played important roles in the formation of several
departments and schools including the Graduate School of Industrial
Administration, the School of Computer Science and the College of
Humanities and Social Sciences' psychology department.

He published 27 books, of which the best known today are "Models
of Bounded Rationality" (1997), "Sciences of the Artificial"(1996)
and "Administrative Behavior"(1997).

In 1991 he published his autobiography, "Models of My Life," and
remarked then about his vision of that all-vanquishing computer
hunched over the chess boards of the world: "I still feel good
about my prediction. Only the time frame was a bit short." And so
it was.



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