Category: Timeline Stories

The first robots that were programmed to “think” the way biological brains do and meant to have free will were built in the late 1940s by William Grey Walter (1910–1977)—an American-born British neurophysiologist, and cybernetician, who wanted to prove that rich connections between a small number of brain cells could give rise to very complex behaviors, essentially that the secret of how the brain worked lay in how it was wired up. We don’t know if Walter knew the pioneering work of Thomas Ross and Stevenson Smith, but his first robots looked quite similar to the Robot Rat of Smith.

The first two robots of Walter, so-called Elmer and Elsie (short for ELectroMEchanical Robot, Light-Sensitive) were often labeled as tortoises because of how they were shaped and the slow rate at which they moved. They were capable of phototaxis which is the movement that occurs in response to light stimulus. Constructed between 1948 and 1949 using war surplus materials and old alarm clocks, they had a single light or touch sensor hooked up to two different paths that ran two different motors acting as two separate neuron brains. The robots had a plastic shell that was phototropic in that it could follow light and act as a bumper sensor. Interestingly, Walter stressed the importance of using purely analog electronics to simulate brain processes at a time when his famous contemporaries Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and Norbert Wiener were all turning towards a view of mental processes in terms of digital computation.

The tortoises were three-wheel machines (which Walter called Machina Speculatrix, because “it explores its environment actively, persistently, systematically as most animals do”), designed to show the interaction between both light-sensitive and touch-sensitive control mechanisms which were basically two nerve cells with visual and tactile inputs. These systems interacted with the motor drive in such a way that the tortoises were actually finding their way around obstacles. They were allowed to randomly wander around the floor in no specific pattern and when they were presented with two light sources equally distanced from their sensor, they’d head towards whichever light they saw as a consistent part of the scanning process.

In one experiment a light was placed on the nose of one of the tortoises. It appeared that the robot was looking at itself in a mirror. Its light began flickering and the robot started shaking as if excited to see itself in the mirror. Walter argued that if this behavior were seen in an animal it “might be accepted as evidence of some degree of self-awareness.”

When presented with certain stimuli, even outside of their programmed range of experience, the robots responded consistently, as if they had a personality. Naturally, they had their quirks and odd behaviors the way living things do. Using only two neurons they exhibited much of the same behaviors and oddities that any biological beings have.

After building the tortoises, Walter added additional capabilities naming his new robot, Machina Docilis. Based on the same physical design, this robot included a Conditioned Reflex Analogue (CORA) which demonstrated simple Pavlovian learning. The new robot had three sensors: a sound detector, a light detector, and a bump switch. The CORA circuitry could be trained to establish learned connections between the three sensors and the motor drive oscillators. This resulted in an ability to learn different behaviors which were initiated by sounds, light, or the bumpers. This kind of circuitry is structurally very similar to neural circuitry most recently identified in marine snails.

Ivan Sutherland is considered by many to be the creator of Computer Graphics and an Internet pioneer. Starting with his Ph.D. thesis, named Sketchpad, which is one of the most influential computer programs ever written by an individual, Sutherland has contributed numerous ideas to the study of Computer Graphics and Computer Interaction. He introduced concepts such as 3-D computer modeling, visual simulations, computer-aided design (CAD), and virtual reality, to name but a few.

Ivan Edward Sutherland was born in Hastings, Nebraska on 16 May 1938. He was immersed in learning since he was young. His father, a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering (born in New Zealand), as well as his mother, a teacher (born 1901 in Scotland), led Sutherland to appreciate learning. His favorite subject in high school was geometry, saying that “…if I can picture possible solutions, I have a much better chance of finding the right one.” Sutherland has always described himself as a visual thinker, hence his interest in computer graphics.

His first computer experience was with the famous computer Simon of Edmund Berkeley. Ivan’s first big computer program was to make Simon divide. To make division possible, he added a conditional stop to Simon’s instruction set. This program was a great accomplishment, it was the longest program ever written for Simon, a total of eight pages of paper tape. Ivan and his brother Bert (William Robert Sutherland (1936–2020)) also became a famous computer scientist) even began visiting Berkeley in New York from their home in Scarsdale while Ivan was still in grade school, and were inspired to envision new avenues for programming.

Sutherland went on the study at Carnegie Mellon University, where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and then went on to earn an M.S. also in Electrical Engineering from Caltech (California Institute of Technology). For his Ph.D., Sutherland went to MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) where he studied under Claude Shannon and Marvin Minsky and developed his revolutionary thesis, Sketchpad: A Man-machine Graphical Communications System, the first Graphical User Interface.

Sketchpad was influenced by the conceptual Memex of Vannevar Bush, as it was envisioned in his fundamental paper “As We May Think”. Sketchpad, in turn, influenced Douglas Engelbart‘s NLS (oN-Line System).

The Sketchpad, completed in January 1963, ran on the Lincoln TX-2 computer, an innovative machine designed in the late 1950s by Wesley Clark (it had a large amount of memory for its time: a vacuum-tube-driven core of 64K words, a faster, transistor-driven core of 4K words, a paper-tape reader, and could also use magnetic tape as auxiliary storage.) TX-2 was an “online” computer (at that time most computers would run “batches” of jobs and were not interactive), used to investigate the use of Surface Barrier transistors for digital circuits. TX-2 included a nine-inch CRT and a light pen which first gave Sutherland his idea. He imagined that one should be able to draw on the computer. Sketchpad was able to do just this, creating highly precise drawings, and also introduced important innovations such as memory structures to store objects and the ability to zoom in and out.

The Sketchpad uses drawing as a novel communication medium for a computer. The system contains input, output, and computation programs that enable it to interpret information drawn directly on a computer display. It was a general-purpose system and has been used to draw electrical, mechanical, scientific, mathematical, and animated drawings. Sketchpad has shown the most usefulness as an aid to the understanding of processes, such as the notion of linkages, which can be described with pictures. Sketchpad also makes it easy to draw highly repetitive or highly accurate drawings and to change drawings previously drawn with it.

A Sketchpad user sketches directly on a computer display with a “light pen.” The light pen is used both to position parts of the drawing on the display and to point to them to change them. A set of push buttons controls the changes to be made such as “erase”, “move”, etc.

Information sketched can include straight line segments and circular arcs. Arbitrary symbols may be defined from any collection of line segments, circle arcs, and previously defined symbols. A user may define and use as many symbols as he wishes. Any change in the definition of a symbol is at once seen wherever that symbol appears.

Sketchpad stores explicit information about the topology of a drawing. If the user moves one vertex of a polygon, both adjacent sides will be moved. If the user moves a symbol, all lines attached to that symbol will automatically move to stay attached to it. The topological connections of the drawing are automatically indicated by the user as he sketches. Since Sketchpad is able to accept topological information from a human being in a picture language perfectly natural to the human, it can be used as an input program for computation programs that require topological data, e.g., circuit simulators.

Sketchpad itself is able to move parts of the drawing around to meet new conditions which the user may apply to them. The user indicates conditions with the light pen and push buttons. For example, to make two lines parallel, he successively points to the lines with the light pen and presses a button. The conditions themselves are displayed on the drawing so that they may be erased or changed with the light pen language. Any combination of conditions can be defined as a composite condition and applied in one step.

It is easy to add entirely new types of conditions to Sketchpad’s vocabulary. Since the conditions can involve anything computable, Sketchpad can be used for a very wide range of problems. It has been used, for example, to find the distribution of forces in the members of truss bridges drawn with it.

Sketchpad drawings are stored in the computer in a specially designed “ring” structure. The ring structure features rapid processing of topological information with no searching at all. The basic operations used in Sketchpad for manipulating the ring structure are described.

Sutherland’s contribution is not the revolutionary Sketchpad, however. In 1964 he replaced Licklider as the head of the US Defense DARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), the motive force of the Internet.

In 1968, together with his student Bob Sproull, Sutherland created the first virtual reality and augmented reality head-mounted display system, named The Sword of Damocles.

Among his students were the famous computer scientist Alan Kay, Henri Gouraud (who devised the Gouraud shading technique), Frank Crow, who developed antialiasing methods, etc.

His company Evans and Sutherland (founded together with his friend David Evans) has done pioneering work in the field of real-time hardware, accelerated 3D computer graphics, and printer languages. Former employees of the company included the future founders of Adobe—John Warnock (1940-1923) and Silicon Graphics—Jim Clark.

Sutherland received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as the National Academy of Sciences among many other major awards.

In 1950 the British company Ferranti Ltd., which produced the world’s first general-purpose commercial computer, the Ferranti Mark 1, had undertaken to display a computer at the 1951 Festival of Britain (a national exhibition and fair that reached millions of visitors throughout the United Kingdom in the summer of 1951). By late 1950, it became evident that this promise could not be fulfilled. Then John Bennett (1921-2010), an Australian scientist, who worked for Ferranti as a computer specialist, suggested that a machine to play the game of NIM (an ancient game of strategy) against all comers should be constructed with a versatile display to illustrate the algorithm and programming principles involved. The design was implemented by a Ferranti engineer, Raymond Stuart-Williams. The computer was called NIMROD and became the first digital computer designed specifically to play a game.

Bennett got the idea of a Nim-playing computer from the Nimatron, an electro-mechanical machine exhibited at the 1939-1940 World’s Fair in New York. Because of the number of vacuum tubes involved, NIMROD was huge—12 feet wide, 5 feet tall, and 9 feet deep, and its weight was three and a half tons. When the Festival of Britain ended, in October 1951, the computer was displayed at the Berlin Industrial Show, again with great success, demonstrated by Dietrich Prinz, a German-English IT pioneer who would succeed, in November of the same year, in realizing the first computer program playing chess. To help explain the NIMROD computer to the British public Ferranti published a pamphlet entitled Faster than Thought. The Ferranti Nimrod Digital Computer. Discovery magazine published an artist’s watercolor impression of the NIMROD in their March 1951 issue.

Later John Bennett reminisced:
“In its simplest form, two players with several piles of, say, matches play the game of Nim. The players move alternately, each removing one or more of the matches from any one pile. Whoever removes the last match wins.”

“The machine was a great success but not quite in the way intended, as I discovered during my time as spruiker on the Festival stand. Most of the public was quite happy to gawk at the flashing lights and be impressed. A few took an interest in the algorithm and even persisted to the point of beating the machine at the game. Only occasionally did we receive any evidence that our real message about the basics of programming had been understood.”

The Nimrod computer did not use a Cathode-Ray Tube display but used a set of fixed lights that turned on and off for a visual to describe what was happening throughout the gameplay. The interesting thing about NIM is that there is a non-obvious strategy that will ensure a win, once it can be applied. Once one player is able to make a “safe” move, the other cannot and must leave it “unsafe”, so that the first can again make it “safe” next time. Furthermore, the strategy involves viewing the numbers of tokens as binary numbers, which makes it perfect for a computer algorithm. NIMROD was an entirely fixed program. Indeed it didn’t really have a “program” in the sense used today—just logic gates wired together to compute a suitable response to each gameplay.

Biography of John Bennett

John Makepeace Bennett was born on 31 July 1921 in the southern Queensland town of Warwick, Australia, the son of Albert John Bennett and Elsie Winifred (née Bourne) Bennett (1887-1962).

John Bennett was educated at The Southport School, then he went to the University of Queensland to study civil engineering. From 1942 until 1946 he served in the RAAF, where he worked on a radar unit on the Wessel Islands and later worked in airfield construction. He then returned to the University of Queensland to study electrical and mechanical engineering and mathematics.

In 1947 Bennett went to Cambridge University to become Maurice Wilkes’ first research assistant as part of the team working to build EDSAC—this was the world’s first practical stored-program electronic computer and the world’s first computer in regular operation from 1949. He used EDSAC to carry out the first-ever structural engineering calculations on a computer as part of his Ph.D. From 1950 until 1955 he worked for Ferranti in Manchester and London as a computer specialist. Here he designed the instruction set for Ferranti Mark 1.

In 1956, Bennett returned to Australia to become a Numerical Analyst (and later Senior Numerical Analyst) at the Adolph Basser Laboratory of the University of Sydney. Until 1958 he taught associated courses in the use of computers. In 1958 he established a Postgraduate Diploma in Numerical Analysis and Computing which was later changed to the Postgraduate Diploma in Computer Science.

In 1961, Bennet became a Professor of Physics (Electronic Computing). In 1972 the Basser Computing Department was split into the Basser Department of Computer Science (for teaching and research) and the University Computer Centre. John Bennett was appointed head of the new Basser Department of Computer Science, but it was not until 1982 that John Bennett’s title was changed to Professor of Computer Science—a title which he held until his retirement.

On 26 January 1952, Bennett married Rosalind Mary Elkington (1926-) (who was also working at Ferranti). They had four children: Christopher John (1953-), Ann Margaret (1955-), Susan Elizabeth (1957-), and Jane Mary (1960-).

In 1986 Bennett, aged 65, retired with his wife to Sydney’s Northern Beaches. He died at home on 9 December 2010.

At the beginning of 1951, the American inventor David Hammond Shepard (1923–2007) constructed the first workable optical character recognition device. On 1 March 1951, he applied for a patent, which was granted on 22 Dec 1954 (see US patent Nr. 2663758 for apparatus for reading). Strangely, in his patent, Shepard didn’t mention the pioneering work of Gustav Tauschek from the 1920s and his US patent (Patent Nr. 2026329), although he mentioned the later patent of Paul Handel (US patent Nr. 1915993).

David Shepard was a very good US engineer, known not only for his early optical character recognition device, but first also for his voice recognition system, Farrington B numeric font used on credit cards, and high altitude wind power devices.

It was in late 1950, when Shepard, a cryptanalyst at the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), the forerunner of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), started building “Gismo” in his spare time, in the attic of his home in Arlington, Virginia, with the help of a mechanically inclined colleague, Harvey Cook Jr. They needed almost a year (and some $4000) to build the prototype, and meanwhile, Shepard applied for a patent.  The patent was granted to him, but it was assigned to the newly formed Intelligent Machines Research Corporation (IMR) (founded in 1952 by Shepard and his colleague from NSA William Lawless, Jr.), which delivered the world’s first dozen commercial Optical Character Recognition systems, to big companies such as AT&T, First National City Bank, Reader’s Digest, and several other major oil companies and banks.

IBM obtained a license on IMR’s patents in 1953 and in 1955 contracted with IMR (and hired Shepard for a couple of years) to build a developmental system that was able to read constrained hand-printed numeric characters if reasonably well formed. However, IBM did not market this system. In 1959 IBM did market a system of its own, classifying it as an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system, and the term OCR from then on has been standard in the industry for this technology.

IMR went on to deliver the world’s first several commercially used systems, including one used by Readers Digest in its book subscription department. Readers Digest donated this system many years later to the Smithsonian, where it was once put on display. The second system was sold to the Standard Oil Company of California, as arranged by the Farrington Manufacturing Company, a leading company in the credit card business at that time, with many systems to read oil company credit cards to follow, one of which was also on display at the Smithsonian later on.

In 1959 Farrington acquired IMR, and the numeric font designed by Shepard, called Farrington 7B (recognition was more reliable on a simple and open font, so Shepard decided to create one, only for digits), has been standard for most of the well-known credit cards since that time. Shepard later left Farrington and founded Cognitronics Corporation in 1962.

“Gismo” of Shepard was a machine to convert printed messages into machine language for processing by computer. It worked by scanning letters with a photoelectric eye and then recording what it had read on a mechanical card-punching machine. It scanned each letter and matched its impression with its built-in memory. Let’s see how the inventor described the device in his patent:

This invention relates to methods and apparatus for interpreting information and the like.
Briefly, the invention relates to the so-called reading apparatus arranged to sense printed characters, punched openings, and the like and to recognize the identity of particular characters or other items passing before the sensing means so that these items may be reproduced in various for is of coding. For example, the invention may be embodied in a machine that will scan a printed page such as a typewritten page, and produce signals which will serve to interpret each character into any desired coding and medium for use at local or remote stations.
While many arrangements are presently known for reading characters, none of the known arrangements serve adequately to read many varieties of printed characters, nor do known arrangements make adequate provision for the misalignment of characters or disfiguration of characters.
The invention provides apparatus which is capable of reading any sort of information that may be sensed such as printing or the like, and to do so even though the characters representing the information may be disfigured and/or incorrectly aligned. With this invention, it is also possible to distinguish among many more characters of an alphabet than is possible with known reading devices.
Accordingly, an object of the invention is to provide improved methods and apparatus for reading and interpreting printed or other information into various media.
A further object of the invention is to provide improved reading apparatus which is capable of distinguishing among a much larger number of characters than is possible with presently known equipment.
A further object of the invention, when photoelectric scanning may be employed, is to provide an electric circuit arrangement to compensate for changes in the output of a photoelectric or another light-sensitive device.
A further object of the invention is to provide methods and apparatus for reading wherein the matter to be read is continuously and rapidly scanned to accommodate a large number of indications which are then combined and analyzed to provide recognition…

Biography of David Shepard

David Hammond Shepard was born on 30 September 1923 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. He was the second son of Leonard Griffin Shepard II (1881-1937), and Elizabeth Strong  Hammond Shepard (1891-1935), who married in 1919. His father was the son of Leonard G. Shepard I (1846-1895), a captain in the United States Revenue Cutter Service, who is recognized today as the first Commandant of the Coast Guard. David Shepard had an elder brother, Leonard Griffin Shepard III (1921-1944), who was killed as a Lieutenant in U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II.

After the early death of his parents (Leonard died on 4 May 1927, and Elizabeth died on 26 June 1935) David was raised by his uncle, the brother of his mother—Laurens Hammond (1895–1973), who was appointed as his guardian. Laurens Hammond was a very interesting figure himself. Born in Evanston, Illinois, on 11 January 1895 to William Andrew and Idea Louise Strong Hammond, Laurens showed his great technical prowess from an early age. His father, William, took his own life in January 1897, ostensibly due to the failure of the First National Bank of Illinois, which he had founded. Upon her husband’s death, Idea, who was an artist, relocated to France with the children (besides Laurens, she had 3 daughters: Eunice, Louise, and Elizabeth) to further her studies, and the family spent the next eleven years in France and Germany. When they returned to Evanston in 1909, Laurens, then 14, was fluent in French and German, and while in Europe, he had already designed a system for automatic transmission for automobiles. His first patent, in 1912, was for a barometer. Hammond studied mechanical engineering at Cornell University, where he graduated with honors in 1916. After taking part in WWI, he became chief engineer for a manufacturer of marine engines in Detroit. In 1919, he invented a silent spring-driven clock. This invention brought him enough money to rent his own space in New York, where he continued his remarkable carrier as an inventor.

In 1922, Hammond invented the Teleview system of shutter glasses in association with 3-D films. In 1928 his work on the synchronous motor led him to set up the Hammond Clock Company, in Chicago. Demand was high and the business soon grew into a large factory. He was responsible for a number of other inventions, such as an electric bridge table. In 1933, Hammond bought a used piano and discarded everything apart from the keyboard action. Using the keyboard as a controller, he experimented with different sound-generating methods, finally settling on one, the tonewheel generator. Thanks to his prior manufacturing and engineering experience, the tonewheel generator was extremely well-engineered by the time the “Hammond Organ” finally went into production in 1935. Tonewheel organs are still in regular use in the 21st century, which is a testament to the quality of the design and execution of the product. Hammond was awarded the Franklin Institute’s John Price Wetherill Medal in 1940 for the invention of the Hammond electric organ.

David Shepard followed the steps of his uncle and studied for two years (1941-1943) electrical engineering at Cornell University, but was called to the US Army. He majored in 1945 as a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics at the University of Michigan and then earned a Master’s Degree in Mathematics at Michigan in 1947. While serving in the Army during World War II (1943-1946) he worked for the Armed Forces Security Agency on cryptanalysis, breaking Japanese codes. After the war, he worked on other codes for the Agency until 1952, when he founded a company to manufacture his patented OCR device—Intelligent Machines Research Corporation (IMR).

Farmington Manufacturing Company bought IMR in 1959, and Shepard was Vice president of Research and Development for two years. He started a new company in 1961, named Cognitronics Corporation, where he developed the conversation machine which became the first commercial device to give telephone callers access to computer data by means of their own voices, using speech recognition. The first words recognized were “yes” and “no”. This later developed into a more accurate method of optical character recognition, OCR, using lasers. David made an appearance on a 1959 episode of the TV game show, “I’ve Got A Secret”, in New York City, to demonstrate his OCR invention that could read and write (the video is available on YouTube).

Starting in 1980, convinced that the world needed a new energy source and that high-altitude wind energy had the potential of being that source, Shepard began researching potential methods of capturing this energy as well as conducting wind tunnel and open-air tests on various approaches, including a test of a rising and descending kite in a Nevada desert location. Later he founded Sky WindPower Corporation with Australian Bryan William Roberts of the University of Sydney.

Shepard was a Charter Member of the TAWPI Hall of Fame, a Life Senior Member of the IEEE, an ACM member present at its founding at Aberdeen in 1947, and a member of the AIAA and AGU. He was a holder of 28 US patents.

David Shepard was married twice. From his first marriage (on 13 June 1947) with Elaine Raiss Shepard (1925-1973), his fellow student at Michigan University, he had a daughter, Paula, and a son, Leonard Griffin Shepard IV. After the death of Elaine in 1973 he married Marilyn Joyce Ralph Shepard (1923–2014).

David Hammond Shepard died at 84, on 24 November 2007, in San Diego, of bronchiectasis.

The American mathematician Marvin Lee Minsky (1927–2016) was a founding figure in the area of artificial intelligence (AI). He is the author of several important texts concerning AI and philosophy, and built, in 1951, the first randomly wired neural network learning machine (SNARC), the confocal microscope (1957), the first head-mounted graphical display (1963), robotic devices (1963, 1967), and a musical synthesizer (1970).

SNARC
Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator (SNARC) was a neural net machine, considered one of the first attempts in the field of artificial intelligence, a device that emulated the complex web of nerves in the human brain to learn from its own mistakes. In the summer of 1951, prompted by a letter from Minsky, the American psychologist, and founder of cognitive science George Armitage Miller (1920-2012) gathered the funding for the project from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research with the work to be carried out by Minsky, who was then a graduate student in mathematics at Princeton University.

The SNARC machine itself is a randomly connected network of approximately 40 Hebb synapses. These synapses each have a memory that holds the probability that the signal comes in one input and another signal will come out of the output. There is a probability knob that goes from 0 to 1 that shows this probability of the signals propagating. If the probability signal gets through, a capacitor remembers this function and engages a “clutch”. At this point, the operator will press a button to give a reward to the machine, then a large motor starts and there is a chain that goes to all 40 synapse machines, checking if the clutch is engaged or not. As the capacitor can only “remember” for a certain amount of time, the chain only catches the most recent updates of the probabilities.

The neural net idea was unique in that it did not require programmers to specify every line of code, but could be “grown” and trained in an organic way. In 1969 Minsky, along with Seymour Papert, wrote the book Perceptrons, the first systematic study of parallelism in computation and a classical work on threshold automata networks.

Biography of Marvin Minsky

Marvin Lee Minsky was born on 9 August 1927 in New York City, to the Jewish family of Dr. Henry Minsky (1895-1954) and Fannie Judith (nee Reiser) Minsky (1902-1985), whose families were natives of Russian Empire. Henry was an eye surgeon, who was chief of ophthalmology at Mount Sinai Hospital, and Fannie was an artist, social activist, and Zionist. Marvin had an elder sister, Charlotte (1925-1983).

Marvin had prodigious intellectual gifts and was educated in progressive schools in New York, where he attended the Ethical Culture School in Manhattan, Fieldston School in Riverdale, Bronx High School of Science, and later the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. After serving in the US Navy in the Second World War (1944-45), he earned a degree in mathematics in 1950 from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, then in 1954 got his doctorate on learning machines, at Princeton University in New Jersey. When Minsky finished his Ph.D., the eminent mathematicians John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, and Claude Shannon all recommended him for appointment as a junior fellow at Harvard.

When his Harvard fellowship ended in 1958, Minsky accepted an appointment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he would remain on faculty for the rest of his life. In his first year at MIT, Minsky founded the AI Lab, which quickly became a leading center for artificial Intelligence research. The lab popularized the idea of the digital sharing of information, giving rise to the open-source movement. The lab conducted much of the initial work on the ARPANET, which ultimately evolved into the Internet of today.

Marvin Minsky was the recipient of numerous honors and awards, among them the Turing Award, the IEEE Computer Society’s Computer Pioneer Award, and the Franklin Institute’s Benjamin Franklin Medal.

On 30 July 1952, Minsky married Gloria Anna Rudisch (1926-), a prominent Boston pediatrician, and they had three children—the twins Henry and Juliana, and Margaret. Gloria recalled her first conversation with Marvin: “He said he wanted to know about how the brain worked. I thought he is either very wise or very dumb. Fortunately, it turned out to be the former.” Minsky and his wife often welcomed students into their home, where several pianos stood as a reminder that Minsky was a musical prodigy, able to improvise fugues in the baroque style of J.S. Bach.

In 1985, Minsky published a book, The Society of Mind, stating that intelligence emerges from the cooperative behavior of multiple agents, none of which is intelligent. Then, in 2006, Minsky published The Emotion Machine, in which he noted, that concepts such as intelligence are ‘suitcase words’, into which one can stuff multiple meanings. He wrote that our resourceful intelligence arises from multiple ways of thinking on multiple levels, and from multiple ways of representing knowledge. Minsky argued that “somewhere down the line, some computers will become more intelligent than most people,” but that it was very hard to predict how fast progress would be. He cautioned that an artificial superintelligence designed to solve an innocuous mathematical problem might decide to assume control of Earth’s resources to build supercomputers to help achieve its goal, but believed that such negative scenarios are “hard to take seriously” because he felt confident that AI would go through a lot of testing before being deployed.

Marvin Minsky died on 24 January 2016 of a cerebral hemorrhage in Boston, Massachusetts, at the age of 88.

Spacewar was not the first computer game ever written (let’s mention only OXO by Alexander Douglas and Tennis for Two by William Higinbotham), but it has an unquestioned place in the dawn of the computer age and the history of computer games. Spacewar was the first to gain widespread recognition, and it is generally recognized as the first of the “shoot-’em’ up” genre.

The Spacewar game was commenced in 1961 by the young computer programmer from MIT Steve “Slug” Russell (born 1937 in Hartford, Connecticut), who was inspired by the writings of the early science fiction author Edward Elmer Smith.

Russell wrote Spacewar on a PDP-1, an early DEC interactive mini computer (the first commercial time-sharing computer) which used a cathode-ray tube type display and keyboard input. It was written in the PDP-1’s assembly language.

Spacewar was a two-player game, with each player taking control of a spaceship and attempting to destroy the other. A massive star in the center of the screen pulls on both ships (called “the needle” and “the wedge”) and requires maneuvering to avoid falling into it. In an emergency, a player can enter hyperspace to return at a random location on the screen, but only at the risk of exploding if it is used too often (there was an increasing probability of the ship exploding with each use).

Steve Russell needed about 200 man-hours to write the first version of Spacewar, and he was assisted by his friends from the fictitious “Hingham Institute”: Martin Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen. Additional features were later developed by Dan Edwards and Peter Samson.

The game spread rapidly to other programmers, who began coding their own variants, including features such as space mines, cloaking devices, and even a first-person perspective version, played with two screens, that simulated each pilot’s view out of the cockpit. It became extremely popular and was widely ported to other computer systems.

The first artificial intelligence program (the first program especially engineered to mimic the problem-solving skills of a human being) was created in 1955-56 by Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, and John Shaw.

Herbert Alexander Simon (1916–2001), a Nobel Prize (in Economics) winner from 1978, was an American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist, whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, computer science, public administration, economics, management, philosophy of science, sociology, and political science. With almost a thousand highly cited publications, he was one of the most influential social scientists of the XX century.

Simon was consulting RAND Corporation in the early 1950s, and while seeing there a printer typing out a map, using ordinary letters, digits, and punctuation as symbols, he realized that a machine that could manipulate symbols could just as well simulate decision-making and possibly even the process of human thought.

The program that printed the map had been written by Allen Newell (1927-1992), a RAND Corporation scientist studying logistics and organization theory. For Newell, the decisive moment was in 1954 he watched a presentation on pattern matching and suddenly understood how the interaction of simple, programmable units could accomplish complex behavior, including the intelligent behavior of human beings.

Newell and Simon began to talk about the possibility of teaching machines to think. Their first project was a program that could prove mathematical theorems like the ones used in Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica. Newell enlisted the help of a mathematician and computer programmer from RAND, John Clifford “Cliff” Shaw (1922–1991), to develop the program.

In the summer of 1956, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, and Claude Shannon organized a conference at Dartmouth College on the subject of what they called “artificial intelligence” (a term coined by McCarthy for the occasion). Simon and Newell proudly presented the group with their Logic Theorist and were somewhat surprised when the program received a lukewarm reception. Later on, Simon confides: They didn’t want to hear from us, and we sure didn’t want to hear from them: we had something to show them! … In a way it was ironic because we already had done the first example of what they were after; and second, they didn’t pay much attention to it.

Cliff Shaw coded the Logic Theorist using an early version of IPL (Information Processing Language) programming language, running on a computer of RAND’s Santa Monica research facility.

The Logic Theorist established the field of heuristic programming and soon proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in chapter 2 of the Principia Mathematica. The proof of one of the theorems was surprisingly more elegant than the proof produced laboriously by hand by Russell and Whitehead. Simon was able to show the new proof to Bertrand Russell himself who responded with delight.

A detailed description of the Logic Theorist can be found in a RAND memorandum from June 1963.

The American physicist and a leader in the nonproliferation movement William (Willy) Alfred Higinbotham (1910—1994) is credited with creating the first computer video game to display motion and allow interactive control with hand-held controllers in the middle of 1958.

William Higinbotham earned an undergraduate degree from Williams College in 1932 and continued his studies at Cornell University. During WW2 he went to work on the radar system at MIT. In the later years of the war, he worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory (where the first atomic bomb was developed) and headed the lab’s electronics group.

In 1947 Higinbotham entered the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York as a senior physicist and later as head of the Instrumentation Division. When in October 1958, the Lab organized its annual Visitors Days, Higinbotham realized how static and non-interactive most science exhibits were at that time and tried to change that, introducing a game as an element of entertainment. He wrote later it might liven up the place to have a game that people could play, and which would convey the message that our scientific endeavours have relevance for society.

Higinbotham decided to create a game—Tennis for Two, and despite the fact, that he had only two weeks for this purpose, he managed to make it, with the help of two of his colleagues—David Potter and Robert Dvorak Sr. They created a unique way to alternate among the computer’s outputs with the transistor switching circuit, creating the image of a tennis court and allowing players to control a movable ball seen on a screen, just like a modern video game. In 1983 Higinbotham recalled—It took me about two hours to rough out the design and a couple of weeks to get it debugged and working. It didn’t take long and it was a big hit.

The Tennis for Two was first introduced on 18 October 1958, at one of the Lab’s annual visitors’ days. Two people played the electronic tennis game with separate controllers that connected to an analog computer (Systron-Donner Model 30) and used an oscilloscope (5-inch in diameter DuMont cathode-ray) for a screen (see the nearby photo).

Visitors playing Tennis for Two saw a two-dimensional, side view of a tennis court on the oscilloscope screen, which used a cathode-ray tube. The ball, a brightly lit, moving dot, left trails as it bounced to alternating sides of the net. Players served and volleyed using controllers with buttons and rotating dials to control the angle of an invisible tennis racquet’s swing.

Liven up the place it did! Hundreds of visitors lined up for a chance to play the pioneering electronic tennis game. And Higinbotham could not have dreamed that his game would be a forerunner to an entire industry that some sixty years later, in 2022, would account for $97 billion in sales in the USA alone, while the global games market reached $211 billion!

On the next 1959 year’s Visitors’ Day, an improved model of the game was presented, as the modifications included a larger monitor, a button to increase the force of a serve, and changeable gravity effects to show what it would be like to play tennis on another planet 🙂 Though the game was again the highlight of the exhibition, this was its final appearance. Higinbotham soon forgot about his game, moving on to pursue more important scientific endeavors.

Higinbotham had more than 20 patents on electronic circuits to his credit, but he never patented his video game, which associates said was the forerunner of the early 1970s video game “Pong”. Higinbotham, discussing in 1983 his decision not to seek the patent, said, “It wasn’t something the Government was interested in” and that he “didn’t think it was worth it”.

Biography of William Higinbotham

William Alfred Higinbotham was born on 22 October 1910 in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He was the firstborn of Rev Robert George Higinbotham (1880-1937), a son of a respected merchant of Irish origin, and a pastor of the Presbyterian Church, and Dorothea Schauffler Higinbotham (1885-1968), a daughter of a teacher and musician of German origin. They married on 11 January 1910 and became the parents of six children: William, Robert, Philip, Frederick, John, and Dorothy Anne (sadly, Philip and Frederick were killed young during World War II).

William grew up in Caledonia, New York, where the family moved in 1917. His interest in science started at the age of 14, when he tinkered with radio sets, trying to pick up the frequency transmissions of the first commercial stations. At 16, he enrolled in a high school physics class and quickly discovered that he had a natural affinity for the subject, leading to his undergraduate degree in physics at Williams College, Massachusetts in 1932, before progressing to Cornell University. Higinbotham was a graduate student in Physics at Cornell University during the outbreak of World War II. He was invited to join research at the MIT Radiation Laboratory, where he worked from 1941 to 1943 on an advanced and important technique known as radio detecting and ranging, later shortened to RADAR. During World War II, he was working at Los Alamos National Laboratory and headed the lab’s electronics group in the later years of the war, where his team developed electronics for the first atomic bomb. Following his experience with nuclear weapons, Higinbotham helped found the nuclear nonproliferation group Federation of American Scientists, serving as its first chairman and executive secretary. From 1974 until his death in 1994, Higinbotham served as the technical editor of the Journal of Nuclear Materials Management, published by the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management. In 1947, Higinbotham took a position at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he worked until his retirement in 1984.

William Higinbotham was married three times. He married Julie Ann Burritt on 9 June 1949, in Bellport, New York, and they had three children: Julie Eileen (1951-2021), Robin, and William B. After the death of Julie, in 1976 he married Margaret (née Gray) Miller (1909-1982).

William Higinbotham died on 10 November 1994 (aged 84) in Gainesville, Georgia, US. The cause was emphysema.

In 1952 Alexander Shafto Douglas (1921–2010), known as “Sandy”, a graduate student at Cambridge, was writing his Ph.D. thesis on human-computer interaction for the University of Cambridge. He decided as part of his thesis to create a computer game on the EDSAC computer at University (one of the first stored-program computers in the world), thus creating the first graphical computer game OXO (also known as Noughts and Crosses, an old non-computer game that people can play with pen and paper).

Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) was a unique early (built in 1948) vacuum tube (it contained 3000 tubes) based British computer, operating 600 instructions per second. It used 32 mercury delay lines (or long tanks) each of which stored 32 words of 18 bits. Hence the total memory capacity of the EDSAC was the equivalent of about 2 kilobytes. A useful feature of this serial memory technology was that it was possible to display the contents of the store on Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) monitors. Each tank stored 16 words of 35 bits. EDSAC used three CRTs, one of which displayed the contents of one of the long tanks. Thus, the display was a matrix of 35×16 dots.

The input of EDSAC was via five-hole punched tape (thus the actual program for the OXO game was punched on a strip of paper, and used an assembler language) and the output was via a teleprinter or CRT. Debuggers still didn’t exist, but a CRT screen could be set to display the contents of a particular piece of memory. This was used to see whether a number was converging, for example. A loudspeaker was connected to the accumulator’s sign bit; experienced users knew healthy and unhealthy sounds of programs, particularly programs “hung” in a loop.

To play the OXO game (see the OXO game simulator nearby), the player would enter input (where he wanted to place his naught or cross) using a rotary telephone controller, and output was displayed on the computer’s dot matrix cathode ray tube. Each game was played against an artificially intelligent opponent (EDSAC) and the player determined who played first (EDSAC or USER).

The text output of the OXO game was something like this:

9 8 7 NOUGHTS AND CROSSES 6 5 4 BY 3 2 1 A S DOUGLAS, C.1952 LOADING PLEASE WAIT… EDSAC/USER FIRST (DIAL 0/1):1 DIAL MOVE:6 DIAL MOVE:1 DIAL MOVE:2 DIAL MOVE:7 DIAL MOVE:9 DRAWN GAME… EDSAC/USER FIRST (DIAL 0/1):

Alexander Douglas’ thesis was a success, earning him his Ph.D. and starting his career in science, however, he would never again program another video or computer game.

Biography of Alexander Douglas

Alexander “Sandy” Shafto Douglas was born on 21 May 1921 in London. At age eight, his family moved to Cromwell Road, near what would become the London Air Terminal.

In the winter of 1938–39, Douglas and his future wife Andrey Parker made a snowman on the grounds of the Natural History Museum. Douglas and his wife would go on to have two children, and at least two grandsons.

In 1940-1945 Douglas took part in the WWII in Home Guard Unit, and later in the Corps of Royal Engineers. After the war, he entered the University of Cambridge, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1953. From 1953 to 1957 he was engaged as a Prize Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. From 1957 to 1960 he set up the Computer Laboratory of the University of Leeds, and it was there that he first became interested in the application of computers to business problems. In 1960 Douglas entered the commercial field as Technical Director of the UK subsidiary of C-E-I-R (now Scientific Control Systems). In 1968 he left CEIR to initiate the European software interests of Leasco Systems and Research Ltd. as chairman. Later he has been a consultant to various agencies of the United Nations, including the Office of Science and Technology the Human Rights Commission, the Statistical Office of the U.N., and UNESCO. He has acted as a consultant also for several international companies including Shell, Philips, and ICI.

Alexander Douglas published over 60 papers and books covering topics in Atomic Physics, Crystallography, Solution of Differential Equations, Computer Design, Programming, and Operational Research in Shipbuilding, Oil Chemical Mining, Engineering, and Transportation Industries, and in the Printing Industry.

Alexander Douglas died in his sleep on 29 April 2010, from pneumonia.

John McCarthy (1927-2011) is a legendary person in the fields of computer science and AI (artificial intelligence). Primarily known as the creator of one of the longest-lived computer languages in use—LISP (in 1958), McCarthy was one of the first people, to be interested in AI (since 1948) and coined the term in 1955. He also developed the concept of timesharing in the late fifties and early sixties. McCarthy made also substantial contributions to the theory of computation and knowledge representation.

McCarthy’s idea for AI originated in September 1948, when he went to the Hixon Symposium on Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior, a conference that joined together leading researchers in different areas related to cognitive science, including famous psychologist Karl Lashley, as well as mathematicians Alan Turing and Claude Shannon. As McCarthy listened to the discussions comparing computers and the brain, he had a watershed moment. From that time on, his chief interests related to the development of machines that could think like people.

In the 1950s, McCarthy was not the only researcher, dabbling in what would be called artificial intelligence. There were several scientists (including Marvin Minsky, Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, and Oliver Selfridge) working in this field. What distinguished McCarthy’s work was his emphasis on using mathematical logic both as a language for representing the knowledge that an intelligent machine should have and as a means for reasoning with that knowledge. This emphasis on mathematical logic led to the development of the logicist approach to artificial intelligence, as well as the development of the computer language LISP in 1958.

The other difference between McCarthy’s approach to AI and others was that previous work in AI had focused on getting a computer to replicate activities that are challenging for humans, such as playing chess and proving theorems of mathematics. In contrast, McCarthy was concerned with mundane and seemingly trivial tasks, such as constructing a plan to get to the airport.

McCarthy maintained that there were aspects of the human mind that could be described precisely enough to be replicated: “The speeds and memory capacities of present computers may be insufficient to simulate many of the higher functions of the human brain,” he wrote in 1955, “but the major obstacle is not lack of machine capacity but our inability to write programs taking full advantage of what we have.”

The term “artificial intelligence” was proposed by McCarthy in 1955 when he began writing (with Minsky, Shannon, and Nathaniel Rochester), the proposal to fund the first conference dedicated to the topic—the famous Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence, which took place in the summer of 1956.

In 1961, McCarthy was the first to publicly suggest that computer timesharing technology might lead to a future in which computing power and even specific applications could be sold through the utility business model (just like water or electricity). He claimed that “computing may someday be organized as a public utility”. This idea of a computer or information utility became very popular in the late 1960s but faded by the mid-1990s. At the beginning of the 2000s however, the idea resurfaced in new forms (cloud services).

In 1966, McCarthy hosted a series of four simultaneous computer chess matches carried out via telegraph against rivals in the Soviet Union (see the lower photo). Although helped pioneer computer chess, he came to think the game was a distraction for programmers.

During the 1970s McCarthy presented a paper on buying and selling by computer, prophesying what has become known as e-commerce. He also invited a local computer hobby group, the Homebrew Computer Club, to meet at Stanford. Its members included Steve Jobs and Steven Wozniak, who later would go on to found Apple Inc. However, his own interest in developing time-sharing systems led him to underestimate the potential of personal computers. When the first PCs emerged in the 1970s he dismissed them as “toys”.

In 1958, McCarthy specified LISP (the name derives from “LISt Processing”)—the second-oldest high-level programming language in widespread use today (only Fortran of John Backus is older, by one year). Like Fortran, Lisp has changed a great deal since its early days, and a number of dialects have existed over its history. Today, the most widely known general-purpose Lisp dialects are Common Lisp, Scheme, and Clojure. Linked lists are one of LISP languages’ major data structures, and its source code is itself made up of lists.

Originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, LISP is based on the notation of Alonzo Church‘s lambda calculus. It quickly became the favored programming language for AI research. As one of the earliest programming languages, Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, and the self-hosting compiler.

In some of his papers like Free Will—Even for Robots, and Deterministic Free Will, McCarthy explored ideas of robot decision-making. He wrote a science fiction story, The Robot and the Baby, to “partly illustrate my opinions about what household robots should be like”. His robot’s reasoning is displayed in a Lisp-like manner as R781 decides to simulate love for Travis, the human baby. The story includes lines such as “(Required (Not (Cause Robot781) (Believes Travis (Person Robot781))))”. The computer industry joke is that Lisp actually stands for Lots of Irritating Single Parentheses.

In 1982 McCarthy appears to have originated the idea of the space fountain, a form of “space elevator”, a tremendously tall non-static active structure (tower) extending up from the ground.

Biography of John McCarthy

John McCarthy was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 4 September 1927, to John Patrick McCarthy (15 Sep 1896-24 May 1963) (born in San Francisco to an Irish Catholic immigrant family) and Ida Glatt-McCarthy (18 Nov 1893-23 Oct 1957) (Lithuanian Jewish origin), who married in 1922. Ida Glatt was born in Taurogen, Lithuania (then part of Imperial Russia) and immigrated to the United States in 1900 with her mother and sister.

When the Great Depression started at the beginning of the 1930s, McCarthy’s parents lost their house, and the family (which now included a second child, Patrick), became briefly peripatetic. They lived for a short while in New York and then in Cleveland, before finally settling in Los Angeles (in part because of John’s respiratory problems), where the senior John McCarthy was hired as a labor organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and developed a hydraulic orange juice squeezer. Ida McCarthy worked as a journalist and had been active in the women’s suffrage movement and both parents of John were active members of the US Communist Party.

Like many child prodigies, John McCarthy was partly self-educated. Due to childhood illness (respiratory problems), he began school a year late, but he quickly made up the time on his own, skipped several grades and wound up graduating from Belmont High School in Los Angeles two years early, in 1943.

As a teenager, McCarthy developed an interest in mathematics and decided he wanted to go to the CalTech—California Institute of Technology. In his application to CalTech, he wrote a one-sentence statement of purpose: “I intend to be a professor of mathematics.”

Receiving a B.S. in Mathematics in 1948, McCarthy initially continued his graduate studies at Caltech, but in 1949 moved to Princeton University, where he received a Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1951.

McCarthy remained as an instructor at Princeton from 1951 until 1953 when he came to Stanford as an assistant professor. In 1955, he left for Dartmouth and then for MIT before returning to Stanford in 1962 as a full professor of computer science, where he stayed until his retirement almost 40 years later.

John McCarthy was honored with the Kyoto Prize in 1988, the National Medal of Science in 1990, & the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2003. He was inducted into the “IEEE Intelligent Systems” AI’s Hall of Fame in 2011.

McCarthy was married three times. His first wife was Martha Coyote, and they had two daughters Susan and Sarah. His second wife was Vera Watson, a programmer, and mountaineer who died in 1978 attempting to scale Annapurna as part of an all-women expedition. He later married Carolyn Talcott, a computer scientist at Stanford, and they had a son, Timothy Talcott.

John McCarthy died on 24 October 2011, in Palo Alto, California, of heart failure.