“That within ten years a digital computer will write music that will be accepted by critics as possessing considerable aesthetic value.”

Herbert Simon Researcher

Professor at Carnegie Institute of Technology and RAND Corporation; co-creator of the Logic Theorist

Said 1958Deadline Dec 31, 1968Herbert A. Simon and Allen Newell, 'Heuristic Problem Solving: The Next Advance in Operations Research' (address to the Twelfth National Meeting of the Operations Research Society of America, November 14, 1957), Operations Research, Vol. 6, No. 1 (January–February 1958), pp. 1-10

Algorithmic composition existed before and during the window (Hiller and Isaacson's Illiac Suite, 1957; Computer Cantata, 1963), but it was received as a technical curiosity rather than as work critics judged to possess considerable aesthetic value, and no computer-composed piece achieved such standing by the late 1960s.