The Lighthill 1973 report's acknowledgment list named Minsky and McCarthy as consultees, but not Newell or Simon

lighthill-reportai-wintersymbolic-aigeneral-problem-solverai-historyhistory-of-mlreceipts

Section 1 of Sir James Lighthill's Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey (UK Science Research Council, drafted July 1972, published 1973) closes with an acknowledgment paragraph naming the individuals whose "published work" and "private written communications and spoken comments" informed the report. The list runs to 51 names and includes "M. Minsky" and "J. McCarthy." Neither Allen Newell nor Herbert Simon appears anywhere in it.

This is a documentary fact about the report's method, and it is load-bearing for how the report's complaints should be read. Lighthill's diagnosis singled out "general problem-solving programs" as persistently disappointing (claim-lighthill-1973-named-general-problem-solving-disappointing) — the era's standard label for exactly the Newell–Simon heuristic-search line (the Logic Theorist, the General Problem Solver). Yet the report neither names that line nor consulted its founders. The complaint lands squarely on the research paradigm Newell and Simon built while drawing on neither of them directly; its named consultees were instead Minsky and McCarthy, whose own 1973 rebuttal dismissed control theory as having "little relevance to AI" (claim-mccarthy-1973-control-theory-little-relevance-to-ai).

The absence sharpens the caveat already recorded inside the general-problem-solving note: the report is a UK funding survey aimed at a research style, not a critique of one lab (claim-lighthill-1973-blamed-combinatorial-explosion). See moc-backpropagation-origins.