I'm looking for a collaborator on an obscure yet historically significant programming project. As some of you know, I previously worked with the team that reanimated ELIZA (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44300641). I'm now working on reanimating the original Logic Theorist (LT), the legendary theorem-proving program written in IPL-V by Newell, Shaw, and Simon at RAND in the mid-1950s (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43822619). LT was one of the first AI programs ever created. It proved theorems in Principia Mathematica, and is considered a founding work of artificial intelligence. And IPL-V, a direct forerunner of Lisp, was explicitly designed to support AI programming (more precisely, symbolic heuristic programming). Fortunately, IPL-V is well-documented, and I've written an interpreter for it in Lisp that (mostly) correctly runs the original LT (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43822619). But I've hit some nuances that I'm having trouble thinking through, and feel like I need fresh eyes and someone to rubber duck with. (Because I'm the only person on earth currently working in IPL-V, I can't ask ChatGPT or Stack Overflow as there is no active community for it, and no historical information other than a few badly OCR'ed publications! I've actually tried feeding ChatGPT and Claude the IPL-V manual and having them help, but, as anyone who has used LLMs to program well knows, they're good for boilerplate in common modern languages, but pretty poor at understanding subtle programming issues, especially in a dead language!) So I'm looking for an Lisp hacker with a fascination for AI and computing history, or who just wants to be able to say they are one of two hackers alive who have worked on one of the first AI systems and languages. The only reward I can offer, aside from that badge of honor, is academic co-publication, as there's significant academic interest in early AI. (Once LT runs, there are several other of the earliest AIs that we should be able to breathe life into!) So if you're intrigued by the idea of bringing the first AI programs back to life on the first AI programming language (really, one of the first ever programming languages, and almost certainly one of the most esoteric!), DM me.