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Dr. Harold Stone
IBM Corp.
30 Saw Mill Rd
Hawthorne, NY 10532

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Dear Dr. Stone:

	It's easy to recommend Allen Newell for the Piore award of IEEE.
It is to that fact that you owe my uncharacteristically prompt response
to your request.

	Much on Newell's early work was in collaboration with Herbert
Simon, so it's hard to separate the credit earned, but it has long since
been clear that neither was a junior partner in their collaboration.

	While the first person to see that the future of artificial
intelligence lay in computers was Turing (1950), the first people to
actually begin were Newell and Simon (1954) with their list processing
language IPL and the Logic Theory Machine.  At the Dartmouth Conference
in 1956, they were the only people with actual results to report.
IPL and Fortran were the two previous efforts that contributed to
my own (1958) work on LISP.

	The Newell and Simon approach to AI, unlike mine and most
others, maintained contact with psychology by making programs
that were directly compared with protocols of human efforts to
solve the same problems.  This work was the largest single contribution
to the revolution in psychology that demolished behaviorism and
established information processing psychology as the main
paradigm for the study of intelligence and problem solving behavior.
The approach was expressed in their book {\it Human Problem Solving}
which contributed to this revolution.

	Their approach evolved through GPS (general problem solver),
and now Newell and various collaborators are continuing it via SOAR,
which again is both a psychological model and an AI tool.  The SOAR
approach is one of the leading candidates for an AI formalism.

	Newell has also led in other areas of computer science.
With Gordon Bell he wrote on computer design systems.  He has
been the leading figure in making the Carnegie-Mellon computer
science department one of the three leading departments in the
country.  It must be Newell, because the department has maintained
its distinctive style while almost all the other personnel has
changed.  Its PhDs who come to Stanford always argue that we
should be more like CMU, and in many respects, I think they're
right.

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	Newell served as chairman of the committee that directed
the five year DARPA effort on speech recognition and deserves
a good part of the credit for that study's achievements.

	I believe that Newell has contributed as much to the course
that AI has taken as any other person.  Therefore, I have no
hesitation in recommending him for the Piore Award of IEEE.

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Sincerely,       

John McCarthy    
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