Introduction to the COMTEX Microfiche Editor of Memos from the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Stanford, California 94305 THE STANFORD Artificial Intelligence Project, later known as the Stanford AI Lab or SAIL, was created by Prof. John McCarthy shortly after his arrival at Stanford in 1962. As a faculty member in the Computer Science Division of the Mathematics Department, McCarthy began supervising research in artificial intelligence an,d timesharing systems with a few students. From this small start, McCarthy built a large and active research organization involving many other faculty and research projects as well as his own. There is no single theme to the SAIL memos. They cannot be easily categorized because they show a diversity of interests, resulting from the diversity of investigators and projects. Nevertheless, there are some important dimensions to the research that took place in the Al Lab that I will try to put in historical context in this brief introduction. 'I thank John McCarthy, especially, for answering numerous questions and for reading the whole introduction for accuracy His advice, "don't try to unify the reports," preempted any contrary obligations I felt to readers Les Earnest was very helpful in giving me names and dates, providing photographs, and reading this account. I also appreciate time and information from Ed Feigenbaum, Raj Reddy, Jerry Feldman, Cordell Green, Roger Schank, Tony Hearn, Bill McKeeman and Nils Nilsson 2Readers should note that since the early 1970's there have been two centers of AI research at Stanford, SAIL and the Heuristic Programming Project (HPP). The HPP memos are not discussed here and are not part of the COMTEX collection. Instead, I have recounted some of the early history of SAIL, and its prehistory, as I remember it and have learned it from others' memories.' It is undesirable (and impossible besides) to try to unify the reports into a single theme, or to unify the research themes into a single purpose. Therefore, this mini-history mentions several themes (and a few names) from the 1960's and 70's that set the major directions of AI research at Stanford. Many of these early interests, such as robotics, have been vigorously pursued ever since. Omissions are unintentional, and should not be interpreted as having implied significance. The present collection is a complete set of SAIL memos from the beginning of the lab until 1982.2 The technical memos in the SAIL series are not of uniform quality. Some of these papers are preprints of journal articles of lasting interest. Others constitute documentation on how to use the system. Still others are hastily written drafts describing work in progress at the time.