Marvin Minsky has made many contributions to AI, cognitive psychology, mathematics, computational linguistics, robotics, and optics. In recent years he has worked chiefly on imparting to machines the human capacity for commonsense reasoning. His conception of human intellectual structure and function is presented in two books: The Emotion Machine and The Society of Mind (which is also the title of the course he teaches at MIT). He received the BA and PhD in mathematics at Harvard (1950) and Princeton (1954). In 1951 he built the SNARC, the first neural network simulator.

Techies and gamers should pay attention to HBO's Westworld, which debuts on Sunday as a major TV show that delves into human artificial intelligence. The sci-fi series explores the morality of creating human-like artificial intelligent beings, how we should treat them, and what the difference is between humans and machines. In a press briefing, I talked with the creators of the show, and during that conversation, video games, virtual reality, and real-world technology came up a lot. The show is a remake of Michael Crichton's sci-fi film of 1973, where rich guests can take a vacation in the almost-real theme park of Westworld, which is full of androids who are instructed not to harm the human guests. The human guests can do anything they want, with no consequences, according to the corporation that runs the technological paradise.

Stuart Russell is a leading researcher in the field of artificial intelligence. He is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, Associate Editor of the Journal of the ACM, and author of "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" (Prentice Hall, 1995, 2003), the leading textbook in the field. His research interests include machine learning, limited rationality, real-time decision-making, intelligent agent architectures, autonomous vehicles, search, game-playing, reasoning under uncertainty, and commonsense knowledge representation. UBIQUITY: The original grand vision of artificial intelligence (AI) in the 1950s and '60s seemed to dissipate into many small, disparate projects. Should this fragmentation be written off as an inevitable Humpty-Dumpty problem or is it possible to bring the fragments back together into a single field? RUSSELL: I think we can put it back together in the sense of being able to join the pieces.

UBIQUITY: Congratulations on "What the Dormouse Said" it's a fascinating book. MARKOFF: Well, I guess I'd call it a revisionist history. It about things that happened around Stanford University between roughly 1960 and 1975, and is a kind of pre-history of personal computing and the personal computer industry. What I was trying to do was to get at some of the culture through which the technology was developed. MARKOFF: Because technology never happens in a vacuum. The book was an effort to try to pin down how personal computing first emerged around the Stanford campus at two laboratories in the 1960's: one was run by John McCarthy, and was called the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; and the other was run by Doug Engelbart and known as the Augmentation Research Center or the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center.

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday April 11 2007 In the article below, the "whirring tapes" of IBM's latest computer in 1949 were an anachronism. Magnetic tape was first used to record computer data in 1951. In the mid-1950s, John Backus, who has died aged 82, led a team at IBM that created a revolutionary new way to communicate with early electronic computers. They invented Fortran, the first true programming language, and in doing so laid the foundations of today's multi-billion dollar software industry. During a long career at IBM, Backus continued to seek better methods of computer programming, but his enduring legacy is Fortran, the language that is still used today to solve complex scientific problems such as weather forecasting and aircraft design.

Backus was born in Philadelphia and grew up in nearby Wilmington, Del., where he was apparently an indifferent student, according to his biographical entry in the Wikipedia. After a stint in the U.S. Army (during which he was treated for a brain tumor), Backus ended up in New York City, where he gravitated toward mathematics. Earning a master's degree in the discipline in 1949, he joined International Business Machines the following year to work on the firm's Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator. The SSEC was one of the last of the large electromechanical computers ever built. It also was one of the first to run a stored program.

This past October saw the death of John McCarthy, one of the pioneers of computer science and a founder of the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a phrase he is credited with inventing. It capped a sad month that also saw the passing of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs and of Dennis Ritchie, the coinventor of Unix and the C programming language. John McCarthy was born in Boston in 1927, but he grew up near Caltech, where he got his B.S. in mathematics. He detoured to Princeton for his Ph.D. but ended up at MIT, where he cofounded its artificial-intelligence lab, the world's first, before going on to Stanford in 1962 to found its artificial-intelligence lab. In between, he found time to invent Lisp, one of the most influential programming languages ever created.

Ray Solomonoff, a physicist who was one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence, died on Dec. 7 in Boston. He was 83 and had homes in New Ipswich, N.H., and Cambridge, Mass. The cause was a ruptured brain aneurysm, said his wife, Grace. As a child Mr. Solomonoff developed what would become a lifelong passion for mathematical theorems, and as a teenager he became captivated with idea of creating machines that could learn and ultimately think. In 1952 he met Marvin Minsky, a cognitive scientist who was also exploring the idea of machine learning, and John McCarthy, a young mathematician.

It is important to divide the overall understanding process into manageable pieces.

Today the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) announced its 2014 fellows, and among the awardees were five researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) -- more than any other academic institution in the world. Srini Devadas, Eric Grimson, Robert Morris, Ronitt Rubinfeld, and CSAIL Director Daniela Rus were among the 1 percent of ACM members to receive the distinction, according to the association's press release. The ACM fellows, chosen from universities, corporations, and research labs, were selected for contributions that have provided key knowledge to the computing field and generated multiple technology advances in industry, commerce, healthcare, entertainment, and education. "While it certainly isn't unprecedented for CSAIL researchers to receive this honor, it is quite remarkable that this year ACM has chosen to recognize five members of our community," said Daniel Jackson, associate director of CSAIL. "We are extremely proud of our PIs who have been selected to be part of such esteemed company."