Introduction to the COMTEX Microfiche Edition of the Early MIT Artificial Intelligence Memos

THESE ARE THE VOYAGES of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and these remarks may help to understand the context of this collection, though in many ways the memoranda speak quite clearly for themselves and my comments are not, in any case, to be regarded as history, for I have written them quite hastily, in much the same spirit of the memos themselves, when it was our strategy in those early days to be unscholarly; we tended to assume, for better or for worse, that everything we did was so likely to be new that there was little need for caution or for reviewing literature or for double-checking anything As luck would have it, that almost always turned out true In any case, my memory is as treacherous as anyone's, and trying to recall those times-even the shapes of spaces where we worked-yields only sharpened images that show the artificial clarity of careful composition; they show "the ways things must have been" as much as "really how they were " We had so little sense, in those days, of "history in the making" that project after project left no written trace at all No memos describe the eyeglasses we made with tiny CRTs projecting solid images before the eyes, or the little wireless computer terminal (which was promptly stolen) the complicated automatic "interfaces" we made for the first robotic experiments When the students made the first "computer games" they were addictive then as now and finally we banned the best one, SPACEWAR, from daytime use with no sense of how historic it was-1 think in 1964-to make the first such ban! And no one ever thought to documentor even photograph-our first'Computer Graphic" blazing galaxies and dazzling worlds of moving shapes, regarded as mere "hacks," and mainly used to amaze our visit.ors. He aimed more toward establishing good logical and mathematical foundations for reasoning, and more toward computer architecture I pursued questions about heuristic control of problem solving systems, and ideas about how brains might work. I preferred to try to formalize heuristic processes, reasoning by analogy, and theories of pattern recognition, while McCarthy worked to formalize not only reasoning, but also programming semantics and computer methodologies; this led him to some of the first systematic ways to prove theorems about programs. The laboratory grew steadily in size, and in ideas from many spheres.