Book Review - Models of My Life
Lee Gladwin
Models of My Life, Herbert A. Simon, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Series, Basic Books, New York, 1991, 415 pp., $26.95, ISBN 0-465-04640-l.
Is reading Herb Simon’s delightful autobiography worth boarding the wrong commuter train? It was for me. Written in an informal style, Models of My Life presents a lively and insightful self-portrait of this father of AI. In keeping with his character, Simon uses the metaphor of the maze to describe his life: “In describing my life as mazelike, I do not mean that I have made a large number of deliberate, wrenching decisions to go off in one direction or another. On the contrary, I have made very few. Obvious responses to opportunities and circumstances, rather than studied decisions, have put me on the particular roads I have followed” (pp. xvii- xviii). With typical humor, he suggests 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 his life, each with its attendant maze: (1) scientist and teacher, including his careers as political scientist, organization theorist, economist, management scientist, computer scientist, cognitive psychologist, and philosopher of science; (2) private person; (3) “university politician, seeking to build and shape the environment for his scientific work”; and (4) “science politician, concerned with the health of social science, with science as adviser to the polis” (p. xviii). These themes and mazes are divided into a “four-panel triptych,” covering his life to the present: Journey to a Twenty-First Birthday, The Scientist as a Young Man, View from the Mountain, and Research after Sixty. Each panel presents the reader with such colorful anecdotes as the follow- ing, which comes from the first panel:
“Then there was the strawberry patch episode, which also seems to belong to Washington Island. Whether during his fourth summer or on some later occasion, the boy was among a party picking wild strawberries. The others filled their pails in a few minutes; there were only a few strawberries in the bottom of his. How could the others see the berries so easily amid the closely matching leaves? That was how he learned that strawberries are red and leaves green, and that he was color-blind” (p. 5).
The stirrings of technical interests and the application of mathematics to the study of administrative behavior are taken up in later chapters that deal with his life as a student and graduate student at the University of Chicago. He set out to major in economics but switched to political science to avoid taking an accounting course requirement. At that time, Charles E. Merriman and the Political Science Department were at “the vanguard of the behavioralism that erupted in political science.” Simon became a participant in this “scientific revolution.” Participation shaped his views about the development of scientific disciplines and taught him the strategies he “later employed in attacking orthodoxy in economics and psychology” and focused his “sights on the phenomena of human thinking and problem solving as the essential core of both organizational theory and economics.”
Outside the Political Science Department, Simon fell under the influence of philosopher Rudolf Carnap and mathematician Henry Schultz. A paper written for Carnap was the genesis for what was to become “Administrative Behavior.” From a paper written for Schultz, he learned “that in empirical science the final test is not mathematical elegance or a priori plausibility, but the match between theory and data.”
Extracurricular activities included attendance at guest lectures such as one given by Alfred North Whitehead: “I repaired to Mandel Hall, the first row of the balcony, to hear his public lecture. I listened intently for an hour, and didn’t understand a word.”
The Second Panel: The Scientist as a Young Man takes up Simon’s life after the University of Chicago and covers his research for the International City Managers’ Association, which introduced him to IBM punched card equipment and programming (rewiring). This research experience convinced him of the need for an administrative theory based on observation and experimentation rather than common sense. This belief led him to write his classic “Administrative Behavior” for his doctoral dissertation, in which he introduced the concepts of bounded rationality and satisficing behavior. It also set his research agenda for more than 20 years. Early teaching experiences at the Illinois Institute of Technology and later contributions to the found- ing of Carnegie-Mellon’s Graduate School of Industrial Administration are also included in this panel.
Cybernetics, early work in machine intelligence, and his own work with Allen Newell and Cliff Shaw on the LOGIC THEORIST are also described in this second panel. In this and later work, they sought to simulate human problem solving and not simply to demonstrate “how computers could solve hard problems.” Unlike D. 0. Hebb, Edwin G. Boring, and later reductionists, Newell and Simon rejected the notion that “the explanatory mechanisms” of behavior had “to be neurological, . . . not because of in-principle opposition to reductionism but because we believed that complex behavior can only be reduced to neural processes in successive steps, not in a single leap.”
Subsequent chapters survey Newell and Simon’s work for the RAND Corporation and the Dartmouth Conference (June 1956) as well as his work on the GENERAL PROBLEM SOLVER. Readers cannot help but be impressed by how much the story of Herb Simon is the history of AI. However, there is more to his life, much more, as suggested by these selected chapter headings: “Building a Business School: The Graduate School of Industrial Administration,” “Research and Science in Politics,” “Creating a University Environment for Cognitive Science and A.I.,” “The Scientist as Politician,” ” Foreign Adventures,” “From Nobel to Now,” “The Amateur Diplomat in China and the Soviet Union,” and “Guides for Choice.”
In The Fourth Panel: Research after Sixty, Simon turns inward and reflects on his philosophy of life. Guided by over 50 years of research in decision making, he ultimately describes him- self as a maze runner, “a creature of bounded rationality using heuristic search to find satisficing-‘good enough’-courses of action.”
Readers interested in Herb Simon and the origins of AI will want to read this book, even if it means occasionally taking the wrong train.
ChangeLog
- 2018-07-21 李亮创建