Oscar Schwartz in IEEE Spectrum: In 1666, the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz published an enigmatic dissertation entitled On the Combinatorial Art. Only 20 years old but already an ambitious thinker, Leibniz outlined a theory for automating knowledge production via the rule-based combination of symbols. Leibniz’s central argument was that all human thoughts, no matter how complex, are … Continue reading In the 17th Century, Leibniz Dreamed of a Machine That Could Calculate Ideas