Herbert Simon, Nobel Laureate in economics, is a polymath, able to conquer any field that he wants to--economics, social science, mathematics, piano, chess, and foreign languages. His autobiography is one of a series of books sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to promote an understanding of science and of scientists. The title “Models of My Life” is meant to indicate that his life has had several major themes: (1) the scientist and teacher, (2) the private person--love, family, and friends, (3) the university politician, and (4) the science politician.

What the book lacks in its prose style it makes up for in an honesty that captures the reader’s interest. You come away with a feeling that you know Simon, warts and all. He is a proud, stubborn workaholic who expects to get credit for brilliant ideas and is peeved when the world overlooks them.

The metaphor of the maze is irresistible to Simon; it has been the basis of his research on understanding human choice, and he views his life in terms of the metaphor. He feels that we act out our lives within the mazes that nature and society place us in:

In describing my life, I have situated it in a labyrinth of paths that branch, in a castle of innumerable rooms. The life is in the moving through that garden or castle, experiencing surprises along the path you follow, wondering (but not too solemnly) where the other paths would have led: a heuristic search for the solution of an ill-structured problem. If there are goals, they do not so much guide the search as emerge from it. It needs no summing up beyond the living of it (p. 367).

I am an adaptive system, whose survival and success, whatever my goals, depend on maintaining a reasonably veridical picture of my environment of things and people. Since my world picture approximates reality only crudely, I cannot aspire to optimize anything; at most I can aim at satisficing. Searching for the best can only dissipate scarce cognitive resources; the best is enemy of the good (p. 361). [Simon uses the term “satisfice” to denote decisions that are not optimal, but are “good enough.”]

The first half of the book, dealing with Simon’s childhood and early education, is somewhat uninteresting. His description of his early professional work on administrative theory is readable but contains too many pointers to books and papers that he has written, without giving the nonspecialist reader a clear idea of his specific contributions. At age 25 he published Administrative behavior [1], a book that challenged much of the received administrative theory of its day. “Bounded rationality,” the most novel component of the work, says that people who behave rationally are not optimizing anything; they are simply making decisions based on what the environment tells them they can and cannot do. “Behavior is determined by the irrational and nonrational elements that bound the area of rationality.”

The second half of the book is of more interest; Simon describes the roots of artificial intelligence, reveals more of his personal life, and explains the worlds of university and scientific politics.

The most important years of my life as a scientist were 1955 and 1956, when the maze branched in a most unexpected way.…This sudden and permanent change came about because Al Newell, Cliff Shaw, and I caught a glimpse of a revolutionary use for the electronic computers that were just then making their first public appearance. We seized the opportunity we saw to use the computer as a general processor of symbols (hence for thoughts) rather than just a speedy engine for arithmetic.…Put less technically, if more boastfully, we invented a computer program capable of thinking non-numerically, and thereby solved the venerable mind/body problem, explaining how a system composed of matter can have properties of mind  (p. 189). 

Those in AI will be disappointed at his passing treatment of an opposing school of AI. In a brief footnote, he indicates that an influential coterie of contemporary AI researchers believe that formal logic provides the appropriate language for AI programs and that problem solving is a process of proving theorems. “They are horribly wrong on both counts, but this is not the place to pursue my quarrel with them.”

Simon is not a modest man. He proudly relates that his research group moved forward from their original success, helping create the new discipline of computer science, producing a major revolution in cognitive psychology, and introducing new ideas into economics and engineering design, not to mention epistemology.

In the frankest part of the book he writes about his marriage, how he deals with his (unconsummated) attraction to other women, and in particular his passion for “Karen,” one of his students. Even this highly emotional incident is phrased in terms of a “theory” of love:

If I did not acknowledge the importance of this episode, I would be falsifying my life. Moreover, the experience added an important corollary to my theory of love: You can love two or more women at once…but you cannot be loyal to more than one (p. 246).

The Ford [Foundation] connection soon led to participation in the affairs of the Social Science Research Council, and later the National Research Council. So, however peripheral research on public management and on organization was to the central themes of the social and behavior sciences, from about age thirty I was as visible as a young man could wish. From then on there was no question that my work, if worth noticing, would be noticed (p. 116).

There is a remarkable congruence between the way Simon perceives the world and acts in it and his theories of bounded rationality and AI. While I wish that the exposition in the first part of the book contained more fire, the second part is well worth reading for the historical insights into AI that it provides and for a remarkably honest look at one of the founders of AI.