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Book Reviews

BookReviewsModels of My Life

Lee GladwinModels of My Life, Herbert A. Simon,Alfred l? Sloan Foundation Series,Basic Books, New York, 1991, 415pp., $26.95, ISBN 0-465-04640-l.

Is reading Herb Simon’s delightfulautobiography worth boarding thewrong commuter train? It was forme. Written in an informal style,Models of My Life presents a lively andinsightful self-portrait of this fatherof AI. In keeping w ith his character,Simon uses the metaphor of the mazeto describe his life: “In describing mylife as mazelike, I do not mean that Ihave made a large number of deliber-ate, wrenching decisions to go off inone direction or another. On thecontrary, I have made very few. Obvi-ous responses to opportunities andcircumstances, rather than studieddecisions, have put me on the partic-ular roads I have followed” (pp. xvii-xviii). With typical humor, he sug-gests that the reader, “looking for

dangerous adventures, or minotaurs,or the heroism of a Theseus” (p. xviii),consider another book.

Simon identifies four themes in hislife, each with its attendant maze: (1)scientist and teacher, including hiscareers as political scientist, organiza-tion theorist, economist, manage-ment scientist, computer scientist,cognitive psychologist, and philoso-pher of science; (2) private person;(3) “university politician, seeking tobuild and shape the environment forhis scientific work”; and (4) “science

politician, concerned with the healthof social science, with science asadviser to the polis” (p. xviii). Thesethemes and mazes are divided into a“four-panel triptych,” covering hislife to the present: Journey to aTwenty-First Birthday, The Scientistas a Young Man, View from theMountain, and Research after Sixty.Each panel presents the reader withsuch colorful anecdotes as the follow-ing, which comes from the firstpanel:

“Then there was the strawberry

patch episode, which also seems tobelong to Washington Island.Whether during his fourth summeror on some later occasion, the boywas among a party picking wildstrawberries. The others filled theirpails in a few minutes; there wereonly a few strawberries in thebottom of his. How could the otherssee the berries so easily amid theclosely matching leaves? That washow he learned that strawberriesare red and leaves green, and thathe was color-blind” (p. 5).

The stirrings of technical interestsand the application of mathematicsto the study of administrative behav-ior are taken up in later chapters thatdeal with his life as a student andgraduate student at the University ofChicago. He set out to major in eco-nomics but switched to political sci-ence to avoid taking an accountingcourse requirement. At that time,Charles E. Merriman and the PoliticalScience Department were at “thevanguard of the behavioralism that

erupted in political science.” Simonbecame a participant in this “scientif-ic revolution.” Participation shapedhis views about the development ofscientific disciplines and taught himthe strategies he “later employed inattacking orthodoxy in economicsand psychology” and focused his“sights on the phenomena of humanthinking and problem solving as theessential core of both organizationaltheory and economics.”

Outside the Political ScienceDepartment, Simon fell under the

influence of philosopher RudolfCarnap and mathematician HenrySchultz. A paper written for Carnapwas the genesis for what was tobecome “Administrative Behavior.”From a paper written for Schultz, helearned “that in empirical science thefinal test is not mathematical ele-gance or a priori plausibility, but thematch between theory and data.”

Extracurricular activities includedattendance at guest lectures such asone given by Alfred North Whitehead:

“I repaired to Mandel Hall, the first

row of the balcony, to hear his publiclecture. I listened intently for anhour, and didn’t understand a word.”

The Second Panel: The Scientist asa Young Man takes up Simon’s lifeafter the University of Chicago andcovers his research for the Internation-al City Managers’ Association, whichintroduced him to IBM punchedcard equipment and programming(rewiring). This research experienceconvinced him of the need for anadministrative theory based on obser-vation and experimentation ratherthan common sense. This belief ledhim to write his classic “Administra-tive Behavior” for his doctoral disser-tation, in which he introduced theconcepts of bounded rationality andsatisficing behavior. It also set hisresearch agenda for more than 20years. Early teaching experiences atthe Illinois Institute of Technologyand later contributions to the found-ing of Carnegie-Mellon’s GraduateSchool of Industrial Administrationare also included in this panel.

Cybernetics, early work in machineintelligence, and his own work withAllen Newell and Cliff Shaw on theLOGIC THEORIST are also described inthis second panel. In this and laterwork, they sought to simulate humanproblem solving and not simply todemonstrate “how computers couldsolve hard problems.” Unlike D. 0.Hebb, Edwin G. Boring, and laterreductionists, Newell and Simonrejected the notion that “the explana-tory mechanisms” of behavior had“to be neurological, . . not because

of in-principle opposition to reduc-tionism but because we believedthat complex behavior can only bereduced to neural processes in succes-sive steps, not in a single leap.”

Subsequent chapters survey Newelland Simon’s work for the RAND Cor-poration and the Dartmouth Confer-ence (June 1956) as well as his workon the GENERAL PROBLEM SOLVER.Read-ers cannot help but be impressed byhow much the story of Herb Simon isthe history of AI. However, there is

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AI Magazine Volume 13 Number 3 (1992) (© AAAI)

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BookRniws

more to his life, much more, as sug-gested by these selected chapterheadings: “Building a BusinessSchool: The Graduate School ofIndustrial Administration,” “Researchand Science in Politics,” “Creating aUniversity Environment for Cogni-tive Science and A.I.,” “The Scientistas Politician,” ” Foreign Adventures,”“From Nobel to Now,” “The AmateurDiplomat in China and the SovietUnion,” and “Guides for Choice.”

In The Fourth Panel: Research afterSixty, Simon turns inward and reflectson his philosophy of life. Guided byover 50 years of research in decisionmaking, he ultimately describes him-self as a maze runner, “a creature o fbounded rationality using heuristicsearch to find satisficing-‘goodenough’-courses of action.”

Readers interested in Herb Simonand the origins of AI will want toread this book, even if it means occa-sionally taking the wrong train.

Books Received

The following books were received bypress time:

n Abrahams, Paul, and Larson,Bruce. UNIX or the Impatient. Reading,Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing,1992. 559 pp. ISBN O-201-55703-7.

n Alshawi, Hiyan, ed. The Core Lan-guage Engine. Cambridge, Mass.: The

MIT Press, 1992. 322 pp. ISBN 0-262-01126-3

w Anthony, M., and Biggs, N. Com-putational Learning Theory. New York:Cambridge University Press, 1992.155 pp. ISBN o-521-41603-5.

n Anzai, Y. Pattern Recognition andMachine Learning. Boston: AcademicPress, 1992. 407 pp. ISBN O-12058830-7.

n Balaban, Mira; Ebcioglu, Kemal;and Laske, Otto. Understanding Musicwith AI: Perspectives on Music Cogni-

tion. Menlo Park, Calif; AAAI Press,1992. 512 pp. ISBN o-262-52170-9.

H Beynon-Davies, P. Expert DatabaseSystems: A Gentle Introduction. NewYork: McGraw-Hill, 1992. 186 pp.ISBN o-07-707240-3.

n Birmingham, William P.; Gupta,Anurag P.; and Siewiorek, Daniel P.Automating the Design of ComputerSystems: The MICON Project. Boston,Mass.: Jones and Bartlett Publishers,1992. ISBN O-86720-241-6.

n Blum, Bruce I. Software Engineering:

90 AI MAGAZINE

A Holistic View. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1992. 588 pp.$49.95. ISBN 0-19-507159-X.

n Butler, Christopher S., ed. Cornpzrt-ers and Written Texts. Cambridge,Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1992. 306 pp.ISBN o-631-16381-6.

n Bradfield, Julian Charles. VerifyingTemporal Properties of Systems. Secau-cus, N.J.: Birkhauser Boston, 1992.

113 pp. $49.50. ISBN O-8176-3625-O.1 Churchland, Patricia S., andSejnowski, Terrence J. The Computa-tional Brain. Cambridge, Mass.: Brad-ford Books, 1992. 544 pp. $39.95.ISBN O-262-03 188-4.

w Desain, Peter, and Honing, Henk-lain. Music, Mind, and Machine: Stud-ies in Computer Music, MusicCognition, and Artificial Intelligence.Amsterdam: Thesis Publishers, 1992.ISBN 90-5170-149-7.

n Dinsmore, John. The Symbolic and

Connectionist Paradigms: Closing theGap. Hillsdale, New Jersey: LawrenceErlbaum Associates, 1992. 300 pp.ISBN O-8058-1080-3.

n Duranti, Alessandro; and Good-win, Charles. Rethinking Context: Lan-guage as an Interactive Phenomenon.Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1992. 363 pp. ISBN O-521-38169-X.

w Farr, Marshall J., and Psotka,Joseph. Intelligent Instruction by Com-puter: Theory and Practice. Washing-ton, D.C.: Taylor & Francis, 1992.ISBN O-8448-1687-6.

n Gardenford, Peter. Belief Revision.New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1992. 277 pages. ISBN 0 521-412609.

n Gardin, Jean-Claude, and Peebles,Christopher. Representations inArchaeology. Bloomington, Indiana:Indiana University Press, 1992. 394pp. ISBN o-253-20709-6.

w Gray, Peter. Object-OrientedDatabases: A Semantic Data ModelApproach. Hertfordshire, England:Prentice-Hall, 1992. 237 pp. $37.95.ISBN o-13-630203-3.

n Hinrichs, Thomas R. Problem Solvingin Open Worlds: A Case Study in Design.Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erl-baum Associates, 1992. 228 pp. ISBN0-8058-1228-S.

n Hoffman, Robert R. The Psychologyof Expertise: Cognitive Research andEmpirical AI. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1992. 395 pp. ISBN 0-387-97686-8.

w Holland, John H. Adaptation inNatural and Artificial Systems: AnIntroductory Analysis with Applicationsto Biology, Control, and Artificial Intel-ligence. Cambridge, Mass.: BradfordBooks, 1992. 211 pp. $14.95. ISBN O-262-58111-6 (paper). $30.00. ISBN O-262-08213-6 (cloth).

n Jubak, Jim. In the Image of theBrain: Breaking the Barrier between the

Human Mind and Intelligent Machines.New York: Little, Brown and Compa-ny, 1992. 348 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-316-47555-6.

n Khatib, Oussama; Craig, John J.;and Lozano-Perez, Tomas. TheRobotics Review 2. Cambridge, Mass.:The MIT Press, 1992. 372 pp. ISBN O-262-11171-3.

n Koslow, Arnold. A StructuralistTheory of Logic. New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1992. 418 pp.$69.50 (cloth). ISBN O-521-41267-6.

n Leigh, J. R. Control Theory: AGuided Tour. London: Pete1 PeregrinusLtd., 1992. 180 pp. ISBN 0-86341-241-6.

n Leake, David B. Evaluating Explana-tions. Hillsdale, New Jersey: LawrenceErlbaum Associates, 1992. 260 pp.$94.95. ISBN 0-8058-1064-l.

D Leyton, Michael. Symmefry, Causality,Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: The MITPress, 1992. 630 pp. ISBN 0-262-12163-8.

n Lozano-Perez, Tombs; Jonas, Joseph

L.; Mazer, Emmanuel; and O’Don-nell, Patrick A. HANDLEY: A Robot TaskPlanner. Cambridge, Mass.: The MITPress, 1992. 227 pp. ISBN 0-262-12172-7.

n McKenna, Thomas; Davis, Joel;and Zornetzer, Steven, eds. SingleNeuron Computation. San Diego,Calif.: Academic Press, 1992. 644 pp.$55.00. ISBN 0-12-484815-X.

n Pearson, Jamie Parker, ed. Digital atWork: Snapshots from the First Thirty-Five Years. Burlington, Mass.: DigitalPress, 1992. 212 pp. $19.95. ISBN O-

13-213489-6.

n Rogers, Yvonne; Rutherford,Andrew; and Bibby, Peter A., eds.Models in the Mind: Theory Perspective,and Application. London: AcademicPress, 1992. ISBN o-12-592970-6.

n Sleeman, D.; and Bernsen, N.Research Directions in Cognitive Sci-ence: European Perspectives. Volume 5.Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence ErlbaumAssociates, Inc., 1992. 339 pp. ISBNO-86377-176-9.

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n Snyder, Wayne. A Proof Theory forGeneral Unification. Secaucus, N.J.:Birkhzuser Boston, 1992. 175 pp.$44.50. SBN O-8176-3593-9.

n Suppes, Patrick. Language forHumans and Robots. Oxford, UnitedKingdom: Blackwell, 1992. 417 pp.,ISBN O-631-18262-4

= Tong, Christopher; and Sriram,Duvvuru. Artificial Intelligence in Engi-

neering Design, Vo lume 2. Boston: Aca-demic Press, 1992. 388 pp. ISBNo-12-660562-79

w Tong, Christopher; and Sriram,Duwuru. Artificial Intelligence in Engi-neering Design, Volume 3. Boston: Aca-demic Press, 1992. 388 pp. ISBNo-12-660563-7.

n Van der Hoek, W.; Meyer, J.-J.; Tan,Y. H.; and Witteveen, C. Nonrnono-tonic Reasoning and Partial Semantics.New York: ELLIS Horwood, 1992. 238pp. ISBN O-13-625146-3

n Varela, Francis0 J., and Bourgine,Paul, eds. Toward a Practice ofAutonomous Systems: Proceedingsof theFirst European Conference on ArtificialLife. Cambridge, Mass.: The MITPress, 1992. 515 pp. ISBN 0-262-72019-1.

1 Warwick, K.; Irwin, G. W.; andHunt, K. J. Neural Networks for Controland Systems. London: Peter Peregri-nus Ltd., 1992. 260 pp. ISBN O-86341-279-3.

Attention Authors!

If you would like us to consideryour book for review, have yourpublishers send a review copy to AIMagazine, 445 Burgess Drive, MenloPark, CA 94025. We’ll include it inthe next books received column.Receipt of a review copy, of course,doesn’t guarantee a review!

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FALL 1992 91