The General Problem Solver

Report on a general problem solving program (1959), by A. Newell, J. Shaw, an H. Simon, is an early AI program.
The basic idea is that you can set up goals, subgoaling, and goal resolution mechanism. You then give the system a problem with a goal, and it automatically resolves it.
This particular paper solves quite a few logic problems.
To digress, the term Artificial Intelligence had not yet been coined. Indeed two of these folks (Simon and Newell) were there when the term was coined, so could reasonably be considered the father's of AI, for what that's worth.
It's also a form of symbol processing.
Newell later went onto to develop the idea what makes people smart is symbol processing. (Natural language fits in here.)
I'm not sure that's right (Kahnemann's fast and slow systems) but it is clear that we do a lot of symbol processing.
It's also clear that ChatGPT doesn't do symbolic reasoning.