Eric Horvitz

AI researcher — later Microsoft Research's chief scientist — who in a July 1987 workshop paper independently stated the trade-off between spending more computation and acting on a partial result, under the name "real-time rationality": "We address the notion of real-time rationality, focusing on the application of knowledge about the expected timewise-refinement abilities of reasoning strategies to balance the benefits of additional computation with the costs of acting with a partial result."

Matters to this vault as an independent 1987 originator of the same trade-off Thomas Dean and Mark Boddy formalized as "anytime algorithms" the following year — Dean & Boddy's own paper calls Horvitz's conclusions "entirely compatible with the discussion in this paper," the textual evidence that the idea was never disconnected from its own moment's AI knowledge (claim-anytime-algorithms-continuously-connected-not-stent-premature). Horvitz went on to formalize "value of computation" (the decision-theoretic expected-utility gain from further reasoning versus acting now) and, with Stuart Russell, co-originated bounded optimality.

References

• claim-anytime-algorithms-continuously-connected-not-stent-premature
• Related: entity-stuart-russell, entity-bounded-optimality
• Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-21-does-the-history-of-ai-or-cognitive-science.md