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Logical Machines (1887)
Peirce's 1887 essay on Allan Marquand's mechanical logic devices — the text in which he posed the AI question a century before the AI field existed, and sketched the first electrical logic circuits.
"Logical Machines," published in The American Journal of Psychology in 1887, is the text in which Peirce formulated what this volume calls the inferential question: how much of thinking can a machine perform, and what must remain with the living mind? Written in response to the logic devices of his former Johns Hopkins student Allan Marquand, the essay combines careful analysis of what mechanical logic can and cannot do with remarkable anticipation of electronic computation. The previous year, in a letter to Marquand, Peirce had sketched designs for electrical switching circuits performing Boolean operations — configurations of serial and parallel connections corresponding to multiplication and addition in logic. These sketches are now recognized by several historians of computing as the first known designs for electronic logic gates.
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The essay's central analytical claim is that mechanical logic machines execute deduction — the one mode of inference whose output is fully determined by