Herbert Alexander Simon

"People sometimes ask me what they should read to find out about artificial intelligence. Herbert Simon's book The Sciences of the Artificial is always on the list I give them. Every page issues a challenge to conventional thinking, and the layman who digests it well will certainly understand what the field of artificial intelligence hopes to accomplish. I recommend it in the same spirit that I recommend Freud to people who ask about psychoanalysis, or Piaget to those who ask about child psychology: If you want to learn about a subject, start by reading its founding fathers." -- George A. Miller, "Complex Information Processing" Continuing his exploration of the organization of complexity and the science of design, this new edition of Herbert Simon's classic work on artificial intelligence adds a chapter that sorts out the current themes and tools -- chaos, adaptive systems, genetic algorithms -- for analyzing complexity and complex systems.

The Sciences of the Artificial

Social and Rational; Mathematical Essays on Rational Human Behavior in Society Setting

Models of Man

Donald W. Smithburg

Victor A. Thompson

At the time of its initial publication, Public Administration helped to define this field of study and practice by introducing two major new emphases: an orientation toward human behavior and human relations in organizations, and an emphasis on the interaction between administration, politics, and policy. Without neglecting more traditional concerns with organization structure, Simon, Thompson, and Smithburg viewed administration in its behavioral and political contexts. The viewpoints they express still are at the center of public administration's concerns.

Public Administration

Throughout Herbert Simon's wide-ranging career—in public administration, business administration, economics, cognitive psychology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and computer science—his central aim has been to explain the nature of the thought processes that people use in making decisions. The third volume of Simon's collected papers continues this theme, bringing together work on this and other economics-related topics that have occupied his attention in the 1980s and 1990s: how to represent causal ordering formally in dynamic systems, the implications for society of new electronic information systems, employee and managerial motivation in the business firm (specifically the implications for economics of the propensity of human beings to identify with the goals of organizations), and the state of economics itself. Offering alternative models based on such concepts as satisficing (acceptance of viable choices that may not be the undiscoverable optimum) and bounded rationality (the limited extent to which rational calculation can direct human behavior), Simon shows concretely why more empirical research based on experiments and direct observation, rather than just statistical analysis of economic aggregates, is needed. The twenty-seven articles, in five sections, each with an introduction by the author, examine the modeling of economic systems, technological change: information technology, motivation and the theory of the firm, and behavioral economics and bounded rationality.

Models of Bounded Rationality: Empirically grounded economic reason

K A. Ericsson

Verbal Reports as Data

Protocol Analysis

Herbert Simon (1916-2001), in the course of a long and distinguished career in thesocial and behavioral sciences, made lasting contributions to many disciplines, including economics,psychology, computer science, and artificial intelligence. In 1978 he was awarded the Nobel Prize ineconomics for his research into the decision-making process within economic organizations. Hiswell-known book The Sciences of the Artificial addresses the implications of the decision-making andproblem-solving processes for the social sciences.This book (the title is a variation on the titleof Simon's autobiography, Models of My Life) is a collection of short essays, all original, bycolleagues from many fields who felt Simon's influence and mourn his loss. Mixing reminiscence andanalysis, the book represents "a small acknowledgment of a large debt."Each of the more than fortycontributors was asked to write about the one work by Simon that he or she had found mostinfluential. The editors then grouped the essays into four sections: "Modeling Man," "Organizationsand Administration," "Modeling Systems," and "Minds and Machines." The contributors include suchprominent figures as Kenneth Arrow, William Baumol, William Cooper, Gerd Gigerenzer, DanielKahneman, David Klahr, Franco Modigliani, Paul Samuelson, and Vernon Smith. Although they considertopics as disparate as "Is Bounded Rationality Unboundedly Rational?" and "Personal Recollectionsfrom 15 Years of Monthly Meetings," each essay is a testament to the legacy of Herbert Simon -- tosee the unity rather than the divergences among disciplines.

Herbert Alexander Simon

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