Originally it was Complex Information Processing. Complex Information processing lives on now only in the title of the CIP Working Papers, a series started by Herb Simon in 1956 and still accumulating entries (to 447). However, from about 1965 much of the work on artificial intelligence that was not related to psychology began to appear in technical reports of the Computer Science Department. Starting in the early 1970s (on one can recall exactly when), they did become the subject of a general mailing and thus began to form what everyone thinks of as the CMU Computer Science Technical Reports.

Between these dates, Charlie organized an Applied Physics Laboratory and became interested in "learning machines" and "self-organizing systems." That interest launched a group that ultimately grew into a major world center of artificial intelligence research - a center that has endured twenty-five years of boom and bust in fashion, has "graduated" over a hundred AI research professionals, and has generated ideas and programs resulting in new products and companies as well as scientific articles, books, and this particular collection itself.

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 on 1962. As a faculty member in the Computer Science Division of the Mathematics Department, McCarthy began supervising research in artificial intelligence and 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. Nevertheless, there are some important dimensions to the research that took place in the AI Lab that will try to put in historical context in this brief introduction.

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.