The General Problem solver and the Logic Theorist program was both realized in the late 1950s on mainframe computers. It was an early attempt in realizing a production systems. Later examples from the same subject were OPS5 (late 1970s) and SOAR (early 1980). A production system has much in common with STRIPS and PDDL planning tools. The idea is to formalize a problem into abstract actions which are planned by a solver. Sometimes, the planning process is supported by a goal stack and (Strips) and a working memory which is common for cognitive architectures for agent simulation.
The reason why the General Problem Solver and modern PDDL planners doesn't match the requirements into Artificial Intelligence is, because the planner/solver itself is useless, if the domain model is not available. All the capabilities which are provided by the STRIPS planner which includes the recursive goal stack will not solve a problem, if the strips input file is missing.
A production system is similar to an expert shell only the environment which is able to find the actions for a given STRIPS file, but it can't answer the question how to transform a domain into the strips file. Before it's possible to start the SOAR program, execute the PDDL solver or taking advantage of the OPS5 system an input file has to provided which contains of the action names, the variable names and the effects written down in a programming language. Even a modern cognitive architecture has the ability to learn, it's not so powerful that it can learn the domain description itself.
Let us analyze the simplest possible cognitive architecture which is a strips planner. Strips takes a domain description as input, creates a graph, and then it will search for a path through the symbolic graph. Programming a strips solver from scratch isn't very hard, because the algorithm for backtracking a graph is well known and the sourcecode is available at Rosettacode. The more demanding problem is how to convert a problem for example a game of Lemmings into a STRIPS domain description. This transformation is called grounding and STRIPS nor General Problem solver has the answer to the problem.
STRIPS domain file
Every STRIPS like planner needs as input file a domain description. This is equal to a domain specific language (Formalized as a grammar) plus some routines written in that language. In the well known robot gripper domain (blocksworld) the grammar is equal to a robot programming language. It contains of commands like opengripper, closegripper and movedown. The STRIPS planner is able to transform the language specification into a program. It's some kind of automatic programming aka genetic programming. The program can be executed on the robot which brings the system into a goal state.
“Learning from demonstration” allows acquire a robot language from human interaction.[1]
[1] Mohan, Shiwali, et al. "Learning grounded language through situated interactive instruction." 2012 AAAI Fall Symposium Series. 2012.