Lighthill's 1973 report singled out 'general problem-solving programs' — the paradigm GPS belonged to — as persistently disappointing

Beyond its general diagnosis of the combinatorial explosion (claim-lighthill-1973-blamed-combinatorial-explosion), Lighthill's Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey (UK Science Research Council, 1973) named one category of work by its era-standard label:

"Some very interesting researches have been carried out to develop general problem-solving programs, and such work can be of research interest to psychologists, but the performance of these programs on actual problems has always been disappointing. Students of all this work have generally concluded that it is unrealistic to expect highly generalised systems that can handle a large knowledge base effectively in a learning or self-organising mode to be developed in the 20th century."

Caveat, load-bearing. The report never names Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, or the General Problem Solver (GPS). It is a UK funding survey whose acknowledged consultees included Minsky and McCarthy, not Newell or Simon — it is not a critique of one lab. But "general problem-solving programs" was the period's standard term for exactly the Newell–Simon research line, whose GPS and Logic Theorist rested on heuristic search for a "good enough" solution rather than an exhaustive optimum (claim-simon-satisficing-and-heuristic-search-same-move). The "learning or self-organising mode" framing shows Lighthill lumping the symbolic search program with the broader ambition of large-knowledge-base autonomy.

This is the report's paradigm-specific complaint standing next to its general one: the disappointment Lighthill records is with symbolic problem-solving, the same "problem solving" faction the Dreyfuses set against the neural-net "learning" faction (claim-dreyfus-critique-targeted-symbolic-ai-not-neural-nets). It sharpens the vault's Perceptrons myth ledger by showing the 1970s AI contraction had a distinct symbolic-AI half (myth-perceptrons-book-killed-connectionism). See moc-backpropagation-origins.