Recently various pundits (including myself) have announced the end of Good Old Fashioned AI (GOFAI). But it has an impressive history, and encountered failure only on the verge of what would have been its greatest triumph. What is GOFAI? Some say it is what grew out of the 1956 Dartmouth AI meeting. However others have described it as based on “symbolic reasoning”, which has a history well before 1956. We’ll adopt this definition. Numbers and the Abacus The invention of numbers and numerals was ...