Essay - A Stanford Reunion - Artificial Intelligence’s Early Years - NYTimes.com

Description

Optimism as Artificial Intelligence Pioneers Reunite

STANFORD, Calif. — The personal computer and the technologies that led to the Internet were largely invented in the 1960s and ’70s at three computer research laboratories next to the Stanford University campus.

One laboratory, Douglas Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center, became known for the mouse; a second, Xerox ’s Palo Alto Research Center, developed the Alto, the first modern personal computer. But the third, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory , or SAIL, run by the computer scientist John McCarthy, gained less recognition.

That may be because SAIL tackled a much harder problem: building a working artificial intelligence system. By the mid-1980s, many scientists both inside and outside of the artificial intelligence community had come to see the effort as a failure. The outlook was more promising in 1963 when Dr. McCarthy began his effort. His initial proposal, to the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Pentagon, envisioned that building a thinking machine would take about a decade.

Four and a half decades later, much of the original optimism is back, driven by rapid progress in artificial intelligence technologies, and that sense was tangible last month when more than 200 of the original SAIL scientists assembled at the William Gates Computer Science Building here for a two-day reunion.

During their first 10 years, SAIL researchers embarked on an extraordinarily rich set of technical and scientific challenges that are still on the frontiers of computer science, including machine vision and robotic manipulation, as well as language and navigation.

In 1966, the laboratory took up residence in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains behind Stanford in an unfinished corporate research facility that had been intended for a telecommunications firm.

The atmosphere, however, was anything but button-down corporate. The antiwar movement and the counterculture were in ...

Original URL

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/08/science/08sail.html?ref=science

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/08/science/08sail.html?ref=science