Oliver G. Selfridge, an innovator in early computer science and artificial intelligence, died Wednesday in Boston. He was 82.

The cause was injuries suffered in a fall on Sunday at his home in nearby Belmont, Mass., said his companion, Edwina Rissland.

Credited with coining the term “intelligent agents,” for software programs capable of observing and responding to changes in their environment, Selfridge theorized about far more, including devices that would not only automate certain tasks but also learn through practice how to perform them better, faster and more inexpensively.

Eventually, he said, machines would be able to analyze operator instructions to discern not just what users requested but what they actually wanted to occur, not always the same thing.

One of the field’s ‘founding fathers’

His 1958 paper “Pandemonium: A Paradigm for Learning,” which proposed a collection of small components dubbed “demons” that together would allow machines to recognize patterns, was a landmark contribution to the emerging science of machine learning.

An early enthusiast about the potential of interactive computing, Selfridge saw his ideas summarized in a famous 1968 paper, “The Computer as a Communications Device,” written by J.C.R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor and published in the journal Science and Technology.

Honoring Selfridge, the authors proposed a device they referred to as OLIVER, an acronym for On-Line Interactive Vicarious Expediter and Responder. OLIVER was one of the clearest early descriptions of a computerized personal assistant.

With four other colleagues, Selfridge helped organize a 1956 conference at Dartmouth College that led directly to creation of the field of artificial intelligence.

“Oliver was one of the founding fathers of the discipline of artificial intelligence,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who is president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. “He has been well known in the field for his early and prescient writings on the challenge of endowing machines with the ability to learn to recognize patterns.”

Theorist also wrote children’s books

Along with producing scholarly papers and technical books, Selfridge wrote “Fingers Come in Fives,” “All About Mud” and “Trouble With Dragons,” all books for children. At his death, he was working on a series of books he hoped might one day become an arithmetic equivalent of summer reading projects for schoolchildren.