Newell's chess machine
Newell described a chess program as a system that decomposes the task into goals and chooses moves by goal, rather than enumerating everything.
Why it matters
This is the move from exhaustive search to search guided by the structure of the problem, the line that led to Logic Theorist.
The talk was given eighteen months before the Dartmouth workshop and contains what became the core of Newell and Simon's approach: limited search directed by intermediate goals. The program itself was not implemented; Newell turned to theorem proving instead.