Executable reanimation of Herbert Simon's Heuristic Compiler (1961) and KBEmacs (1984)
The arXiv preprint reports 'Executable Archaeology' work that reanimates two historical AI programming systems: Herbert Simon's Heuristic Compiler (1961) — reproducing the compiled code from Simon's 1963 paper — and KBEmacs (1984) from MIT's Programmer's Apprentice — reproducing the SQRT sequence from its December 1984 self-test. The authors used reexecution of original code and explicitly note they relied on a modern AI-assisted coding tool (Anthropic's Claude Code Opus 5.5) to help carry out the detailed reanimation.