Allen Newell (March 19, 1927 - July 19, 1992) was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND corporation and at Carnegie-Mellon’s School of Computer Science. He contributed to the Information Processing Language (1956) and two of the earliest AI programs, the Logic Theory Machine (1956) and the General Problem Solver (1957) (with Herbert Simon).

SOAR is an attempt to realize some of the considerations from Newell's plea for a unified theory of cognition , titled, “You can’t play twenty questions with nature and win,” (1973). There exist other cognitive architectures in this vein, in particular, John Anderson’s ACT theory, which has become a widely popular unified architecture, successfully employed by cognitive scientists today to model human behavior in a wide range of tasks.

He was awarded the ACM's A.M. Turing Award along with Herbert Simon in 1975 for In joint scientific efforts extending over twenty years, initially in collaboration with J. C. Shaw at the RAND Corporation, and subsequently with numerous faculty and student colleagues at Carnegie-Mellon University, they have made basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing.

Reference

• Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon, Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences
• Publications by Allen Newell from Interaction-Design.org