Herbert A. Simon (June 15, 1916 - February 9, 2001) was an American economist, political scientist, and social science theorist. In 1978, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for being one of the most important researchers on decision-making in organizations.
Short biography
Herbert A. Simon was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He attended the University of Chicago, graduating in 1936 and receiving his Ph. D. in 1943. He worked as an assistant at this university (1936-1938), as well as in organizations related to the management of state bodies. Including the International Association of City Managers (1938-1939) and the Bureau of Public Administration from the University of California at Berkeley (1939-1942), where he directed the program of administrative measurements.
After this professional experience, he returned to the university. He was assistant professor (1942-1947) and professor (1947-1949) of political science at the Institute of Technology. In 1949 at the Technological InstituteCarnegie began teaching administration and psychology. And after 1966 - computer science and psychology at Carnegie Mellon, which is located in Pittsburgh.
Herbert Simon has also spent a lot of time advising public and private institutions. He, along with Allen Newell, received the Turing Award from the ACM in 1975 for contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human perception, and the processing of certain data structures. He received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association in 1969. He was also appointed Distinguished Member of the North American Economic Association.
Theory of Bounded Rationality
Consider Herbert Simon's theory of bounded rationality. She points out that most people are only partially rational. And that, in fact, they act according to emotional impulses that are not completely rational in many of their actions.
Herbert Simon's theory states that personal rationality is limited to three dimensions:
- Available information.
- Cognitive limitation of the individual mind.
- Time available for decision making.
Elsewhere, Simon also points out that rational agents experience limitations in formulating and solving complex problems and in processing (receiving, storing, searching, transmitting) information.
Simon describes a number of aspects in which "classical"the concept of rationality can be made more realistic to describe the economic behavior of real people. He gives the following advice:
- Decide which utility functions to use.
- Recognize that there are costs involved in collecting and processing information and that these operations take time that agents may not be willing to give up.
- Assume the possibility of a vector or multivariate utility function.
Furthermore, bounded rationality suggests that economic agents use heuristics to make decisions rather than rigid optimization rules. According to Herbert Simon, this course of action is due to the complexity of the situation, or the inability to process and compute all alternatives when processing costs are high.
Psychology
G. Simon was interested in how people learn and, together with E. Feigenbaum, developed the EPAM theory, one of the first learning theories to be implemented as computer software. EPAM has been able to elucidate a considerable number of phenomena in the field of verbal learning. Later editions of the program were used to form concepts and gain experience. Together with F. Gobet, he completed the EPAM theory to the computer model CHREST.
CHREST explains how elementary pieces of information form building blocks, which are more complex structures. CHREST was mainly used to implement aspects of the chess experiment.
Work with artificial intelligence
Simon pioneered the field of AI, developing with A. Newell the Logic Theory Machine and the General Problem Solver (GPS). GPS is perhaps the first method developed to isolate problem-solving strategies from information about specific problems. Both software was implemented using a data processing language developed by Newell, C. Shaw, and G. Simon. In 1957, Simon stated that AI-powered chess would surpass human skills in 10 years, although the process took about forty.
In the early 1960s, psychologist W. Neisser stated that although computers could reproduce "hard cognition" behaviors such as thinking, planning, perceiving, and inferring, they could never reproduce cognitive behavior. Excitation, pleasure, displeasure, lust and other emotions.
Simon reacted to Neisser's position in 1963 by writing an article on emotional cognition, which he did not publish until 1967. The AI research community largely ignored Simon's work for several years. But Sloman and Picard's next work convinced the community to focus on Simon's work.
