okay so we're just going to generally
ask you some questions about
um your your life your experience with
how were you born and grew up in your
early education
and how you learned that okay go ask him
so where were you born and
where did you start your education in
boston public schools
what did you do your undergraduate uh
caltech
what did you study there mathematics
and uh when did you start to become
interested in
artificial intelligence
in the fall
of 1948 there was a conference
at caltech called hixson
hi-xon symposium on cerebral mechanisms
and behavior
and they
compared the
brain and the computer
and it gave me the idea of using
computers
for to behave intelligently
and many years later after when i got
the kyoto prize
and was asked for some
but my lecture be autobiographical
i went back there to see
to look up who had talked about using
computers to behave intelligently
and discovered that no one had
that i had simply jumped to the
conclusion
that people were interested in that
both uh john von neumann and warren
mcculloch were at that
do you recall hearing either of them
well i've had had subsequent
interaction with von neumann
i never had any personal interaction
with mccullough
uh was that interaction on theory of
computation or automatic theory
no on artificial intelligence
but um
so this was 1948 i had just graduated
from caltech
and in mathematics
and spent a year an additional year at
caltech as a graduate student
and then i went to princeton as a
graduate student in mathematics
and when i went to princeton
uh i went to see the neumann
at the institute for advanced study
and uh told him about some ideas that i
had
and he said write it up write it up
and
after just a little bit of further
consideration
i decided that the ideas that i'd
explained to him
were not very good so i didn't write
them up
i should have but because
they were reinvented by other people or
at least some of them were
and my
judgment that they were not good ideas
they were a probabilistic model of an
automaton connected to a brain
and the problem with it was
that there was no way
in that model of putting particular
facts
that is of the um
the brain learning particular facts or
representing
the brain having learned particular
effects
and so that was 1949
and
it was 1958 before i could write a paper
in which uh
i did discuss how to make the brain
learn particular facts that is
representing uh
perhaps in mathematical logic
and that was a paper
called programs with common sense
and i think that
did play an important role in starting
off
the field of logical reality
did you continue your conversations with
von neumann on these talks
no i didn't um
which was dumb of me
when i organize the
dartmouth
conference on artificial intelligence
i wanted one neumann i wanted to invite
von neumann
as a participant but
he was already dying
i kind of doubt that he would have liked
my subsequent ideas
because um
alan newell told me about his
negative reaction to newell's ideas on a
chess program
and it wasn't quite the same thing
but uh
it allowed me to feel that of course
this is many years later that
he might not have had a positive
reaction to my ideas
what was his objections with the chess
program
i don't know maybe
newell told me and i don't remember
uh or maybe newell
only headed second hand
that is
was a consultant to rand corporation
and so was mondayman and
uh maybe
uh you know
when i'm undiscouraged iran corporation
from
supporting middle's work in that area
so how did you come which is bad advice
which rant corporation fortunately did
not take
they ran all the way
so what what
what led you to organize the conference
at dartmouth
how did you get involved
well
i'm not a very good organizer
but i have quite good
initiative in deciding that something
should be organized
and um previously i
organized i
got together with claude shannon
and uh
we sent out invitations to contribute
papers to something
that later was published as
theory of automata i think that was it
maybe it was published in some
autonomous studies
anyway it was published by princeton
university press
in the annals of mathematics studies
and did you know most of the
contributors before you
issued a call or did you meet them
through the process of
the conference and the publication
i think i knew less than half of them
now i knew minsky because he was a
fellow graduate student at
princeton
but in general i didn't uh
uh
unlike minsky who has a big talent for
knowing everybody that uh
i don't have that talent
when i was in mit i never went to see
mcculloch
although i should have
and actually
attempted to avoid
norbert weiner
because having read his book
i didn't think he would like my ideas
the cybernetics book yeah
why did you think that your ideas
weren't compatible
uh he was
wedded to the idea of
direct feedback and
mathematical feedback in the sense that
there was
a numerical measure of the difference
between
where you were and where you wanted to
get to
and
my ideas
were quite different we're interested
are in
uh logical deduction
from facts that you had to
uh facts about how to achieve a goal
now you could
you could put that in a pseudo
cybernetic form but neither i nor
anybody else ever did
but i talked about it from time to time
but never did it
now the slogan of cybernetics
was very popular
particularly in the soviet union
as soon as they were allowed to stop
attacking it
as long as stalin was alive they had to
attack him
so um how did you meet claude shannon
i spent the summer of 1952
at bell labs
that was
after i got my phd
my phd in 1951.
what was your phd thesis
it was um
on solving
differential equations
by projecting
between a space of gradients
and a space of vector fields
that satisfied
an algebraic condition
and then um where when did you arrive at
mit
what when did you start at mit
excuse me when did you go to mit
oh uh when i got my phd
i stayed at two years at princeton as an
instructor
and i went to stanford
and after a year stanford decided they
had three
acting assistant professors and they
kept
two of them and i was the third and i
went to dartmouth
and then um
ibm gave a computer
uh our set to set up the new england
computation center
and it was physically at mit
and uh a third of its time was
devoted well went to mit directly
and a third of its time was
um
available to new england colleges
and uh i ended up being the dartmouth
representative
on that and
somehow uh
oh i picked up computing very fast
oh that was because i had spent a summer
at ibm
summer 55 at ibm
and what kind of projects were you
working on
between 51-55
well um
mostly still most of my time was in pure
mathematics
and in my opinion
considering pure mathematics which is
what stanford did
they made quite reasonable decision in
deciding they'd keep the other two guys
and
let me go
partly that was
because while i was a pure mathematician
i tended to
be distracted by thinking about
ai but
at that time not really getting
far enough to in
my major ideas to publish
i only got that far in 1958
i was
um when did you start actually
programming computers with what you
considered to be ai
well the first thing i did was start to
write a chess program
which i wrote in fortran
and
i wrote the easy part
which were the legal move routines and
so forth
and then i was stuck
on the main strategy
and dithered about that but
i turned the program over to
some mit students
undergraduates who
completed it and
they first completed it
for the ibm 704
and then redid it for the
deck pdp-6
and i think they called it in their
version
mac hack 6
but i noticed that it still had
even in the pdp6 version a lot of my
symbols in them
and why did you choose to do a chess
program and a lot of others were talking
about chess
what where others were talking about
mathematics in chess but
no it was um
actually about the second program
that played a full game
uh the first one being well the first
the second american program play a full
game
uh
i don't know when the russian program
came along but it might have been a
little earlier
touring had all the ideas
even earlier but
but never had
sufficient computer access
even on computers of which
he was the main person who designed
now i had a new idea
or at least it was new
uh in the west the russians also
invented it independently
although i was first at first
at least their paper on it was 1963. and
i was haranguing people on it and
probably even in 1956
that was the alpha beta
heuristic
but my alpha beta heuristic was
complicated by thinking of
optimistic and pessimistic evaluations
so the fact is if you gave up that
notion
and just took a simple evaluation the
fact that it gave the same result as
minimax
was discovered by
mike levin and dan
edwards who actually wrote a paper on
that fact
the person whoever
who disentangled who did what
is don knuth who wrote a paper for
artificial intelligence
in which he
interviewed people
but um i was the first
person outside of you know i don't think
i was the first person
to try to identify that was a kind of
separate thing
arthur samuel had something like it
in his checkered program
but he never
sort of picked it out as a separate
intellectual object
and um when did you come to understand
that it was really kind of a movement
of ai but it would be really a field of
its own
well
in some sense by the time i
uh okay in one sense you can say
on one particular date which was august
31 1955.
uh
now maybe earlier maybe 1952
i wrote these i called this call for
these papers on automata studies
and when the papers came in i was
disappointed
too many of them were about automata
and i remember having a discussion with
claude shannon
where i was interested in
uh
machine intelligence
uh and he thought any such title was
much too flashy
uh and so we picked this automatic
theory of automata
or something like that as being the
title
now actually that we should have such a
book was made may this suggestion was
made to me
by a princeton graduate student by the
name of jerry reynolds
which is just a purely
uh oral dis suggestion made in
conversation
but anyway um
the august 31 was when i
wrote the proposal for the dartmouth
summer study
i got three other people to go in with
me on it minsky and
shannon and
i'm forgetting who else
and we
proposed to the rockefeller foundation
for a summer study
where some number of people like 10
would devote the entire summer
to thinking about artificial
intelligence
and i introduce
the term artificial intelligence
on that date when i
wrote the proposal i had to think of a
name to call it
the thought of artificial intelligence
ah
now later donald mickey
used the term machine intelligence
and my opinion is that that was a better
choice
who ended up coming to the conference
well my idea that um
a bunch of a bunch of people would
devote the entire some
summer to it didn't work
the first place the rockefeller
foundation didn't do this
anywhere near enough money
but the second place
uh
hardly any of the people who did come
were willing to devote that much time
it was more than like they were willing
to come for a few days
and tell us what they were doing and
then they would go off and do it
now the only people
who were seriously devoted to artificial
intelligence at the time
where i saw minsky
newland simon
and i'd say ray solomon
now
of these the furthest events were under
one sign
and
i got the idea of this processing from
but they had
they used an absolutely terrible
language
over the ipl
which
they stuck with for quite a long time
finally the cmu people
switch to lisp
well maybe that's not quite true anyway
ipo was abandoned
and lisp took the idea of
list processing from them and then
for the form of the language
took fortran as its
model but then it turned out
that um
to write a program for
symbolic differentiation
would go well
if the
algorithm was allowed to be it's not a
function
of differentiation function first of all
if differentiation was considered to be
a function
uh applied to the symbolic expressions
and secondly if that function was
allowed to be
recursive in the sense of in the
computer science sense
of calling itself and
uh so
i i think that lisp
which was introduced or i started on it
in the fall of 1958
ah it may be the first
language no that's not quite true
i think ibl the functions could
call themselves but not through
an automatic mechanism built into the
structure
of the language
so anyway that was
started programming lisp
but the curious thing is
that
i
wrote a report
uh in the beginning of 59
in which i wanted to show that this
was universal
as a main computational means and so i
wrote a universal function
and i wanted to show that compared to a
universal turing machine
the which took
touring about six pages to describe
in his 1936 paper was only
a few lines and this
i should do that
uh well the thing that i wrote down had
a bug in it
but in any case
one of the programmers steve russell
saw that my report
and programmed you that
in the sense of what we were doing then
with lisp
is we were hoping to have a compiler but
we didn't have a compiler
so we were doing hand compiling and he
hand compiled eval
and said well we have an interpreter for
this
and after a little
put up a little resistance and i had to
agree that steve was right
and
okay well enough of that
tell me about the ai lab at mit
well
minsky and i started that
now here's my version which may not be
entirely correct
and that is that i encountered minsky
and the corridor
said we ought to have a we really ought
to have an artificial intelligence
laboratory
and he said that's a good idea let's do
that
and then along came jerry wiesner who is
the head of the research laboratory of
electronics
and i said marvin and i want to have an
artificial intelligence laboratory
and he said all right what do you need
and i said we need a room
and the secretary
and a key punch and two programmers
the reason i said and how about six
graduate students
and we said yes
and that was it and the reason why that
was it
was that mit
had just received a joint services
contract
and what mit had done
was that on
it had divided the prize up
among various departments
and the mathematics departments share
was support for six graduate students
but um
it wasn't clear what this joint serves
as a good
contract would do with the six graduate
students
so when minsky came along
uh minsky and i came along
listener had a solution to his problem
and
turned over his 76
these six graduate students so somehow
the
resources were suddenly available
so it spoiled me
in the sense that i felt that
that's the model of what a proposal and
its acceptance
you just meet the guy in the corridor
and ask him
and he says yes
it says what else do you mean
so who are some of the first uh graduate
students
uh there's david lucken and david park
they're both englishmen
and
they wrote theses in pure mathematics
but they later switched
to a topic they had resisted when i
proposed it
which was proven programs correct
both of them did that
the name of braden
forgotten his first name he subsequently
went to work
now there was jim slagle
but i forget whether he was one of those
six or not
in the spring of 1962
mit by then mit had promoted me to
oh
after this confessed to double-crossing
dartmouth
uh john kemeny who had
hired me at dartmouth
so i was dartmouth's representative on
this thing
and i got a sloan foundation fellowship
which i spent in mit that is for one
year
and
mit was willing to hire me
and as a assistant professor of
communication
sciences in the electrical engineering
department
and
so i
gave up the dartmouth appointment and
went to mit and
by the spring of 62 i had been promoted
to associate professor at mit
and i got quite out of the blue
a telephone call from george fox forsyth
at stanford
who asked me if i'd be willing to come
to stanford
and being slightly
miffed by stanford having previously
decided not to
keep me i said well i've been at
stanford before
i could only come as a full professor
and i thought that would turn him off
but he said i think i can manage that
uh
and uh i was very startled because i've
been
just made an associate professor at mit
and that would
be a jump in one year to a full
professor
and i'd never
heard of forsyth before
and uh later on when i looked him up
he's a numerical analyst and he would
have had
no occasion to have ever read a paper of
mine
in the course of his work but he
was had the ambition to have a computer
science department
and
i had already had some
had developed some reputation there
i don't know precisely what the
reputation
was it certainly was connected with ai
and also with proving
facts about computer programs
but anyway um
now mit was willing to there's also
a jump in salary
associated with a stanford officer
now mit was willing to more than match
the salary
which was startling to me from 9000 to
mit was going to go to 15 000
but they weren't willing to make me a
full professor right away
because they considered
uh minsk and me to be a pair
and couldn't promote
didn't feel they could promote one
without the other
and we were in different departments in
a math department
would have had to agree
to promote minsky
so they were willing to make me director
of research for the computer science
department and so forth
but i really did like california and
wanted to go back to california
so i ended up accepting the stanford
office
it's beautiful here um so it was anybody
else working in computer science at
stanford when you've arrived
well
forsythe was a numerical analyst
and he considered numerical analysts
analysis to be part of computer science
i was the first person he hired
and then the second person was a
young numerical analyst
jane goblin
and uh and he launched a great campaign
and eventually got donald trump
to come to stanford
so forthcycle was up
uh that was a
real had a real talent for building a
department
we were the second computer science
department
in the country and maybe in the world
purdue was ahead of us by a few months
well
the students who've worked for me
are one of them who worked for me on the
chess program
now on kodak went to work for
dec and was one of the designers of the
pdp-6
and one of the ideas
that he and the other people that that
took from me
which
was the idea of time sharing
which i hadn't mentioned before
somewhere at mit there's a big
set of oral interviews with me on the
subject of time sharing
but
but anyway the pdp-6 was
had in it
uh an interrupt system designed for time
sharing
and also some instructions that were
suitable for lisp
it didn't require much or rather it
didn't make
it was much better without it
they were half word manipulation
instructions
but oh we didn't give it a big advantage
over any other
computer that existed at the time in any
country
that is that it had an 18-bit address
and the
ibm 704 and its successors
could have had an 18-bit address
but the engineers could not build such a
big memory at the time
and so they designed it
so that a 15-bit address was the maximum
the 704 could have
and when the soviets copied
american computers they also did a
15-bit address
but the soviets copied the 15 beta
address
just about the time when the
ibm had decided that no a 15-bit address
was too small
uh
so soviet sm6 had a 15-bit address
so anyway
let's see what's relevant here
oh we want to make the path to the
stanford ai lab uh well
uh dec gave
me or or the you know stanford
uh a pep one computer
oh i had designed a time sharing system
for a pdp-1 computer
as a one day a week consultant
uh bbn
and
it was programmed by
sheldon boylan
who was
just graduated as a history
the actual programming of it was the one
man ever
he never did anything else in computer
science in computing
after that maybe have worn out
uh
jack dennis at mit did another
time sharing system for the pdp one
because the pdp one
that that gave mit
was more limited than the one that vbn
bought
it couldn't have the same time sharing
system
so anyway
so now the stanford ai lab
okay
i read a book
called a study of thinking
by jerome broner
and it was the notion of
it had a notion of concept in it
and the notion of concept was a boolean
combination
of elementary concepts
and i thought that was wrong
because it didn't allow for relations
and
and they were particularly interested in
vision
so you could
consider the concepts of the shapes of
the letters
that is uh
is it convex uh
does it have a hole in it and so forth
if you think of enough elementary
concepts
you can make enough combinations
to discriminate
the alphabet
but my complaint
is that it wouldn't really
enable you to draw a letter
that you should consider
uh for example
a letter that has a vertical line
segment and
three
horizontal line segments
which uh
point to the right from
the top middle and bottom
of the vertical
and each about
two-thirds the length of the vertical
now you can tell some of that over
somebody that over the telephone and
they can draw it
and turn out to be a capital e
or you can take the same thing and wrote
it rotate it by
counterclockwise by 90 degrees
this russian letter shop
so my slogan was description not
discrimination
and in particular i pointed out
that if you wanted to do manipulation
then description was what you needed
of the objects that you were going to
manipulate
so if you were going to do robotics
then you needed description
so
i asked for money
for the stanford ai lab
to get a pdp 6 computer
not being satisfied with the pdp one
computer the
deck had given me and that
i got beefed up by
uh i set for grant
and sharing with patrick soupy's
and so we did
get to say islam
and
the now
i'm not sure when the word robotics came
in
uh now of course the word
robot came up in science fiction long
before it came
up in any science
are you familiar with the history of
that topic
yeah right
now
we were certainly her i was certainly
not interested
in undertaking a complete robot
and it was i might not have believed it
at the time but it was
turned out not to be possible
with the resources that we had
even for the just the mechanical part of
it
what was possible
was arms
is to build a single arm
and that was possible
because there was a graduate student at
stanford
victor scheinman
who was i would say a real genius
as a mechanical engineer and designer
and he designed several
mechanical arms
he he designed one the first one he
designed was a hydraulic arm
and it had i remember these
plastics tubes that had the high
pressure hydraulic
fluid in them
and it was decided
not by me i didn't do any close
supervision of that
but if one of those tubes ever broke
that arm would swing and
anybody who's in the way would really
get hurt
so it was put into a
little house built around it
but it was never used
designed some much smaller and weaker
arms that were
electrically powered and those were the
ones that were used by the stanford
aisle
when did you first meet
let's see i came to stanford
in the fall of 62.
it seems to me the
we got the stanford ai lab and our
big increase in money from
darpa that enabled us to buy the pdp6
computer
was 65
and um
when i thought we needed an arm
uh my my first idea about that
was i'd read about these remote arms
that had been used during
world war ii to handle
radioactive material and i said ah that
must have
led to further developments and
i discovered no and they've simply been
abandoned at the end of world war ii
uh so that we were gonna have to design
our own
okay
i had darpa to write some letters saying
really wouldn't be a good idea if
someone with her training went back to
czech slovakia
that didn't help but
it didn't what did help was that hurt
the university university of
pennsylvania which is where she was
after she got her stanford phd
got a congressman to
intervene anyway
well if you're going to interview her
she knows
she knows her story more correctly
what was she like as a student to work
with
hard-working
who are some of the other early students
that were
interested in robotics
so
well there were a couple of other
faculty members
who did it younger faculty members
one of them was roger
are you interviewing him
and jerry feldman
he invented this language called
sail which
in his original naming
stood for stanford artificial
intelligence language
and uh i
objected to that on the grounds that
lisp
was senior to sail
and so he said all right
he just stands for sale
well lisp survives and sale is dead so
uh
now i'm trying to remember the student
who did most of the programming of the
arm
he was an electrical engineering student
not a computer science
student
now from a robotics point of view
let's see there's
from a robotics point of view a key
thing
is that there were a number of phd these
that
were associated with what you would call
today components of a robot
rather than complete robots
so there was um
bruce bromgaard
oh
you know i think it was he who wrote the
one about
driving the cart around the lab
we inherited from the mechanical
engineering department
a cart that could be radio controlled
we saw movie control radio controlled it
from our computer
it hadn't been first been built
as um
a prototype of a cart that could be
driven on the moon
with a two and a half
second delay
so it might have been an ancient
prototype
the vehicle that was driven on the moon
sometimes but two and a half
second delay
so i'm thinking
i think it was baumgardt who did that
but maybe he did something else
and
there's a guy who did a thesis on face
recognition
who else are you going to interview
well somewhat later students were on
some more about
rodney brooks we've talked to
several several people at stanford
bernie
ken salisbury
no i was thinking ah
of those people the one whom i'm sure
would know what everybody did is palm
garden
um
no
if i were so to speak a normal professor
and had lost big amounts of money
through
memory through going getting old
i'd remember all those names and maybe
i'll remember them tomorrow but
well the names i remember most of the
names i remember but
who did which thesis all right
so the topics
the cart now the question is who did the
actual
programs in which the
all right there was the block stacking
program
so somebody did that one
it was
then there was the assembly
of uh
an automobile wallet water pump
that was somebody's thesis bomb guard
wouldn't know that
so
and then there was some speech
recognition
that ready supervised
reddy's earth thesis that he had done on
the pdp-1 was speech recognition
so we never made a complete robot
that is we could have in principle
have put the arm on the cart and so
forth
but remember that all of these things
were done
on a pdp-6 computer in a time sharing
mode
on well it was possible
to sign up for time
for uh
we small hours in the morning in which
you would
get uh
oh it was a complicated sign up in which
you would
sign up for lambs and bams
i don't think i remember that because i
never
i never bothered with it because my own
use of the computer did not
was not cpu intensive i
never did used it for anything but
typewriter
for writing papers
what would you say was the relationship
between
artificial intelligence and robotics
particularly at stanford
well
as i say my motivation for starting the
robotics
was uh
having this slogan about concepts which
is
after all an ai idea
uh but
i never even met bruner so i didn't get
into an argument with him
i should have and he was there at
harvard when i was at mit
i didn't do it uh
though i suspect the
i didn't write a paper about that but i
suspect that the
point was in my proposal
to darpa that got us the
large sum of money that permitted me to
hire quite a large number of graduate
students in
computer science and electrical
engineering
and permitted use to get her own pdp six
computer
and to keep updating it to a pdp 10 and
a k8
and uh
we also uh
that was
uh
gave us big discounts
on the
all of our upgrades
and
uh i never really tried to figure out to
what extent
they were matters of gratitude
for what we had done for them
or and to what extent they were
merely
making the sale i don't know
but they certainly did a lot of
gave us a lot of credit and
they used our drawing program
to write the drawings for the
i think maybe the ka-10
at some point when the guys had a
project to design our own
pdp-10 like computer only much faster
and prepared the design and got sent off
to darpa
and darpa said yes i look i had a bunch
of consultants look at it they said yeah
it will
probably work and then darpa decided
no we don't want to be in that business
didn't support it
well xerox park designed their own
pdp-10
building
so the robotics was
in some sense
an illustration of this
argument about ai
but of course it was useful or
led to being things being useful
and certainly ah
let's put it this way
when walter cronkite came to interview
me
i did not try to make him understand
this
more abstract notion of discrimination
and
versus description
but um
there was quite a bit of
industrial robotics
already uh
but they were even less likely
or they were to write papers about it
than the academic part so
we did i remember pay a visit to a ford
plant
they showed us where they were doing
assembly
and also i once paid a visit to ibm
where they were doing some
automatic assembly of comp partial
automatic
assembly was sort of very interesting
there because
you could see the things being
assembled automatically and then there
was some part
of the work that where it would suddenly
expand out i think
uh
to a part where it couldn't be done
automatically in there and maybe a
department of 40 women doing a
manual assembly
some part of it
now let's see so the ai
lab i think
move to campus
um comes to me in 1989
and then
we had a lot of trouble getting funding
from darpa and dissolved it
we didn't get the space on campus that
we were promised
oh if you want a lot of detail have you
interviewed or are you going to
interview lester earnest
lester ernest is the
executor also executive officer of the
ai lab and he
did a lot of our interaction with darpa
and with
suppliers and a lot of the supervision
projects and a fair amount of initiative
on projects
i once remember
larry roberts asking me
what the relation was he said
can you fire him or can he fire you
and i said well i believe i can fire him
would you like me to try
well several years when the shortage of
funds became sufficiently acute
i had to do that
so what do you think ai gained from
adventures into robotics research
well a lot of the specific
uh
pieces of research contributed to ai
the face recognition the speech
recognition
ah
uh
the driving the
cart around the uh lab
mechanical assembly and so forth
these things
uh
they established a sort of
boundary of what was relatively easy to
do
yeah i think uh
ernest is a guy you should definitely
enter point and view
did you have much interaction with the
people at sri
and uh their robotic work
well i guess the basic answer is no
and my hesitation is that i'm trying to
figure out why
are you going to interview niels nelson
yes
now
engelbart said something
in which he contrasted his motivations
and mind and
um
i think he uh
misrepresented mine
in order to get a contrast
he was interested in man-machine
interaction
and i was interested he said in
what a machine can do all by itself
and of course i was also interested in
machine interaction
time sharing was my big
biggest work in that area
as well as being interested in what a
machine could do by itself
so
i remember being very skeptical of a
mouse
because it was one more device having
followed
the light pen and so forth
it took me a while to realize it yes but
the mouse was much better
do you have any stories you'd like to
share about working with
marvin minsky
no basically minsky and i work
separately
what would newell and simon like uh to
interact with
his colleagues what
what was it like interacting with newell
and simon
in the early days
well
i annoyed them
rats on a specific occasion
and they were justifiably annoyed
but not necessarily with me
ah in september of 1956
there was a meeting
maybe of ieee or maybe it was called ire
in those days
in boston and i was invited to give
a talk on the dartmouth summer
project and the
state of a.i
and
i
told what i knew
but in terms of actual implement of a.i
they were ahead of us
um
and if uh if there were young people
interested in pursuing
careers in artificial intelligence and
robotics what would you recommend
to them to study and pursue a career
what kind of advice would you give them
depends on how good they are
if there is self-confidence as i was
then uh i would recommend that i
recommend to them don't pay any
attention to anybody's
advice think of it for yourself
about it for yourself
i think ai needs new ideas
and it's most likely to come from new
people
the probability that it will come from
someone who is 83
very unlikely
although i just read
in the new york times an
obituary of someone who died at the age
of 97
who is most famous for something that he
did after the age of 90.
could you tell us just a little bit
about some of the challenges that you've
an ai and robotics that you
think are the most important ones you've
seen solved and
others that are pending
me so
so
oh no
sometimes i feel i mean i do feel
what harrison schmidt said about nasa
did you read that
the only scientist to ever walk on the
moon
is a geologist
he said nasa
should be abolished
and we started
with complete wish well now i'm
forgetting
exactly what he said and what i think
started with new people
because we started with young people
and now they've grown old
do you think robotics is a sort of new
way to to restart some of what ai was
aiming towards in the beginning well i
don't even know how
the leading people that i uh and
robotics are
so i can't even say that thing because i
don't know
there is just a big conference on
non-monotonic reasoning and
held in lexington and kentucky
and i should have gone but
i'm not very mobile these days didn't go
i got a greeting on it
signed by about 100 people
about half of the names i recognize
which worries me it may be too many
okay well i think that's just what does
it unless there's anything you'd like to
add
no that's fine
thank you very much thank you
well i was quite prepared to believe
that
because when i wrote the thing down
in in this august 31st 1955
trump i was home i
wasn't absolutely sure that
i hadn't heard the term somewhere else
and uh at least it's something i wrote
later on i said i wasn't sure of that
with anybody who knew it so he said he'd
invented it
but then he said he would invent it in
the spring of 1956
which was of course quite a long time
after
the call for um that's something
the dartmouth conference had gone out
and
all sorts of people had accepted the
invitation
and i said look maybe you invited
invented it earlier
but he was absolutely could not be
persuaded
that and that he might have invented it
earlier
but somebody might have
but i did at least as far as anybody
knows
invent the term artificial intelligence
and i did propose logical
way to do it
and now
i wouldn't be certain
about uh orient whether i was the first
to
orient vision computation towards
description certainly one of the first
who did that
did the fact that the robots were
embodied and can move in space
help and manipulate help
with the notion of description or change
the notion of description
at all
well yeah because
okay now here's an unsolved problem
the description of objects
with flat surfaces
is reasonably understood
geometry provides us with that
the description of
irregular objects
uh
he's not he's not well understood
and
almost not done or i don't know anybody
who does it because
anyone who can
describe say a cat
as a solid object
or a person
thank you