GOFAI

In the philosophy of artificial intelligence, GOFAI ("Good old fashioned artificial intelligence") is classical symbolic AI, as opposed to other approaches, such as neural networks, situated robotics, narrow symbolic AI or neuro-symbolic AI.^[1][2] The term was coined by philosopher John Haugeland in his 1985 book Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea.^[3]

Haugeland coined the term to address two questions:

• Can GOFAI produce human level artificial intelligence in a machine?
• Is GOFAI the primary method that brains use to display intelligence?

AI founder Herbert A. Simon speculated in 1963 that the answers to both these questions was "yes". His evidence was the performance of programs he had co-written, such as Logic Theorist and the General Problem Solver, and his psychological research on human problem solving.^[4]

AI research in the 1950s and 60s had an enormous influence on intellectual history: it inspired the cognitive revolution, led to the founding of the academic field of cognitive science, and was the essential example in the philosophical theories of computationalism, functionalism and cognitivism in ethics and the psychological theories of cognitivism and cognitive psychology. The specific aspect of AI research that led to this revolution was what Haugeland called "GOFAI".