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An Artist Built an Exact Replica of Artificial Intelligence's Birthplace

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Instead, they're put on show as part of an installation that takes the lifework of original AI scientists Allen Newell and Herbert Simon and brings it to life within the very technology they dedicated their lives to creating. "This is kind of like a history room," says artist Daniel Pillis, who spent three years researching and creating the installation. Pillis's interest in the history of robotics and artificial intelligence began to really take off when he started graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University in 2012. The installation is based of Newell and Simon's original office space, which Pillis replicated through physical archives and oral accounts of the room from former Carnegie Mellon employees. The recreation features minute details about the way the scientists worked from the 1950s through the 1980s as they created the building blocks for artificial intelligence technology, featuring things such as Simon's standing desk workspace with actual chairs he used and messy piles of papers, which Newell was known to keep around his work station.