Clifford Shaw

…perhaps most successful example was Clifford Shaw’s Chicago Area Project, carried out during the 1920s and ’30s, which applied the ecological theories of University of Chicago sociologists Robert Park and Ernest Burgess in an attempt to motivate local residents to deal with the social problems of their neighbourhoods.

…they worked with computer expert Cliff Shaw to construct a computer model of human problem solving. Called the General Problem Solver, it could find solutions to a wide range of fairly structured problems, such as logical proofs and mathematical word problems. This research, based on a heuristic procedure called “means-ends…