“That within ten years a digital computer will discover and prove an important new mathematical theorem.”

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

No computer discovered and proved an important new theorem in the ten-year window; contemporaries such as Hubert Dreyfus noted in the mid-1960s that the field was still far from it. The landmark computer-assisted results came much later — the four colour theorem in 1976 and the Robbins conjecture in 1996.