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Perhaps no other view concerning the theoretical foundations of artificial intelligence has been as widely accepted or as broadly influential as the physical symbol system conception advanced by Newell and Simon (1976), where symbol systems are machines — possibly human — that process symbolic structures through time. From this point of view, artificial intelligence deals with the development and evolution of physical systems that employ symbols to represent and to utilize information or knowledge, a position often either explicitly endorsed or tacitly assumed by authors and scholars at work within this field (cf. Nii et al., 1982 and Buchanan 1985). Indeed, this perspective has been said to be "the heart of research in artificial intelligence" (Rich 1983, p. 3), a view that appears to be representative of its standing within the community at large.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-2699-8_5

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