Herbert A. Simon Short Quotes

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Over Christmas, Allen Newell and I created a thinking machine.

Herbert A. Simon
Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds.

Herbert A. Simon
The world you perceive is drastically simplified model of the real world.

Herbert A. Simon
In the computer field, the moment of truth is a running program; all else is prophecy.

Herbert A. Simon
Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.

Herbert A. Simon
The behaviour of individuals is the tool with which the organisation achieves its targets.

Herbert A. Simon
Scientific discovery, when viewed in detail, is an excruciatingly slow and painful process.

Herbert A. Simon
All correct reasoning is a grand system of tautologies, but only God can make direct use of that fact

Herbert A. Simon
Problem formulation in science is to be understood by looking at the continuity of the whole stream of scientific endeavor.

Herbert A. Simon
A complex decision is like a great river, drawing from its many tributaries the innumerable premises of which it is constituted.

Herbert A. Simon
Learning is any change in a system that produces a more or less permanent change in its capacity for adapting to its environment.

Herbert A. Simon
The criterion of efficiency dictates that choice of alternatives which produces the largest result for the given application of resources.

Herbert A. Simon
The techniques of the practitioner are usually called 'synthetic'. He designs by organizing known principles and devices into larger systems.

Herbert A. Simon
Decision making processes are aimed at finding courses of action that are feasible or satisfactory in the light of multiple goals and constraints.

Herbert A. Simon
The world is vast, beautiful, and fascinating, even awe-inspiring - but impersonal. It demands nothing of me, and allows me to demand nothing of it.

Herbert A. Simon
Human problem solving, from the most blundering to the most insightful, involves nothing more than varying mixtures of trial and error and selectivity.

Herbert A. Simon
The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be - how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function.

Herbert A. Simon
A major task in organizing is to determine, first, where the knowledge is located that can provide the various kinds of factual premises that decisions require.

Herbert A. Simon
Organizations and institutions permit stable expectations to be formed by each member of the group as to the behavior of the other members under specified conditions.

Herbert A. Simon
[Even Darwin's] natural selection only predicts that survivors will be fit enough, that is, fitter than their losing competitors; it postulates satisficing, not optimizing.

Herbert A. Simon
Think of the design process as involving first the generation of alternatives and then the testing of these alternatives against a whole array of requirements and restraints.

Herbert A. Simon
Before a science can develop principles, it must possess concepts. Before a law of gravitation could be formulated, it was necessary to have the notions of acceleration and weight.

Herbert A. Simon
Before we can establish any immutable 'principles' of administration, we must be able to describe, in words, exactly how an administrative organization looks and exactly how it works.

Herbert A. Simon
Roughly speaking, rationality is concerned with the selection of preferred behavior alternatives in terms of some system of values, whereby the consequences of behavior can be evaluated.

Herbert A. Simon
The central task of a natural science is to make the wonderful commonplace: to show that complexity, correctly viewed, is only a mask for simplicity; to find pattern hidden in apparent chaos.

Herbert A. Simon
Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent - not with how things are but with how they might be - in short, with design.

Herbert A. Simon
Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.

Herbert A. Simon