Symbolic AI People

Alan Turing (1912–1954) was a British mathematician whose 1936 paper defined computation with an abstract machine. His 1950 paper proposed the imitation game, now called the Turing test, and he is counted among the founders of artificial intelligence.

John McCarthy (1927–2011) was an American computer scientist. His 1955 proposal is credited with coining the term “artificial intelligence”, he organised the 1956 Dartmouth workshop, and he created the LISP programming language.

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) was a political scientist, psychologist and computer scientist who, with Allen Newell and J. C. Shaw, built the first successful AI program and later received the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Berlin-born American computer scientist who wrote ELIZA, an early program that held a written conversation with a user, and later published an influential critique of artificial intelligence.

American computer scientist and psychologist who, with Herbert A. Simon and J. C. Shaw, built the first list-processing language and the earliest heuristic problem-solving programs, treating thought as computation.

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) was an American scientist who co-founded MIT’s AI laboratory and co-signed the 1955 Dartmouth proposal. With Seymour Papert he wrote the 1969 book Perceptrons, which analysed the limits of simple neural networks.

Edward Feigenbaum (born 1936) is known as the father of expert systems. His projects produced DENDRAL, META-DENDRAL, MYCIN and ONCOCIN, he pioneered the term "knowledge engineering", and he shared the 1994 ACM Turing Award.

American electrical engineer who built one of the first checkers-playing programs and, in a 1959 paper, helped name the field now called machine learning.

Zhang Bo (born 1935) is a scholar in automatic control and artificial intelligence. He studied and taught at Tsinghua University and helped found the State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Technology and Systems.