Early Logic Machines

Early Machines Devised to Solve Problems in Logic The world's first real logic machine, in the sense that it could actually be used to solve formal logic problems, was invented in the early 1800s by the British scientist and statesman Charles Stanhope (third Earl of Stanhope). A man of many talents, the Earl designed a device called the Stanhope Demonstrator, which was a small box with a window in the top, along with two different …

…interest in special-purpose logic machines waned in the 1940s with the advent of general-purpose computers, which proved to be much more powerful and for which programs could be written to handle formal logic. Bibliography Gardner, Martin. 1968. Logic Machines, Diagrams, and Boolean Algebra. New York: Dover. Kowalski, Robert. 1988. The Early Years of Logic Programming. Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 31: 38-43. Feigenbaum, Edward A., and Julian Feldman., editors. 1995. Computers and Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.