Oliver Selfridge pt. 2

One of the greatest things to be a part of at Oliver's presentation, was listening to him reminisce about A.I. history with members of the audience. This wasn't intentional, it just sort of happened naturally as he presented his slides. He'd share a thought, someone in attendance would ask a question, then in response, he and his peers, also in attendance, would bring up past work that validated/invalidated their answers. In doing so, they couldn't help but go off on little sidetrips down memory lane.

Upon reflecting about their time at Bell Labs and DARPA, you could hear the joy and gratitude in his exchanges with McCarthy. They'd describe the work, and mention others working there. They looked back together fondly on a time working with Minsky. Oliver went on to express his sadness at losing Rosenblatt. He told the story of perceptrons and thought it unfortunate Frank didn't get the chance to counter Minsky's arguments against his findings. He also mentioned a brief time of greatness at DEC, and you could sense the early joy and then feel the anger and sadness as his tone changed; He described watching their great products and research efforts take a dive due to poor leadership in the company and he had some choice words for Ken Olsen. You could also hear Oliver's sad frustration at losing Licklider. He thought Licklider could have lived many more years if he would've just taken better care of himself at the end, and he wished they could of had those years. He had a great amount of respect for that man.

They were just brief mentions, but you felt like you were right there with him. I've always been a fan of computer science, and for me, being in that room gave me the chance to meet so many of my heroes. People who I've read about, and who's formulas and algorithms I've studied, all suddenly there live and in 3-d confirming my studies and enriching what I know with those little details that let you know it's real. It was awesome to get to go back to those places with them, just for those short moments.

Well, on that note. I thought of immediately hitting them all up and putting together a book on the history of A.I. Listening to him, I realized we've lost many greats already, and that losing more is a given. I wanted to capture those voices before they were lost. Upon looking them all up after the lecture, I found Nils Nilsson is actually doing just that.

From his homepage:
The Quest for Artificial Intelligence. I am writing a book on the history of AI. I hope to finish by the end of 2008

I'll be the first in line to buy it.