Oliver Selfridge, an Early Innovator in Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 82

Oliver G. Selfridge, an innovator in early computer science and artificial intelligence, died on Wednesday in Boston. The cause was injuries suffered in a fall on Sunday at his home in nearby Belmont, Mass., said his companion, Edwina L. Rissland. Credited with coining the term "intelligent agents," for software programs capable of observing and responding to changes in their environment, Mr. Selfridge theorized about far more, including devices that would not only automate certain tasks but also learn through practice how to perform them better, faster and more cheaply. Eventually, he said, machines would be able to analyze operator instructions to discern not just what users requested but what they actually wanted to occur, not always the same thing. His 1958 paper "Pandemonium: A Paradigm for Learning," which proposed a collection of small components dubbed "demons" that together would allow machines to recognize patterns, was a landmark contribution to the emerging science of machine learning.