Artificial Intelligence Lecture Videos

Yes, I was a math major at MIT in 1969. I started taking EE classes and eventually ended up with a second degree in EE/CS. It was during this time that I took Winston's AI class. The lectures took place in the Institute's largest lecture hall; it was a popular class for good reason, Prof. Winston's class was great.

I'd had take-home tests before but Prof. Winston's were the first and only 24 hour tests that I've ever had. I remembered that he said that they had tried out the problems on some of the TA's for the class and that it would only take us a few hours to finish. For me at least, it took 24 hours and I still wasn't done.

Prof. Winston's class material was mostly in Lisp, but we also looked at Planner, kind of a DSL for AI. I was very impressed by a program presented by Winston that was capable of performing symbolic integration. Prof. Winston remarked, after we had discussed the program, that really, it wasn't a complicated system, just a simple algorithm with a data base of facts about integrals.

He also had a very funny, perhaps apocryphal, story about Joseph Weizenbaum's program ELIZA, a program that carries on a conversation with its user in the manner of a psychotherapist (like the doctor command of Emacs). Again, it turns out to be a simple program in Lisp with a small database of keywords and responses. Apparently, Weizenbaum had been working on the program on an MIT timesharing system and another professor had seen he was working late so he used the system's chat program to attempt to communicate with Weizenbaum (somewhat like the Unix talk command that lets one user contact another currently logged in user). However, Weizenbaum wasn't actually there he had gone to sleep and had just left his terminal with ELIZA still running and connected to the I/O of the terminal. The professor asked a question like "What are you working on so late?" and ELIZA responded in it's typical fashion: "Is there a reason that it's important to know why I am working so late?". The professor, a bit put off said something like "You were on the computer late and I was just curious." and ELIZA said back "Why do you feel that you are curious?" the conversations continues: Prof: "Why are you acting so strangely?", ELIZA: "Tell me more about your feelings that I am acting so strangely."

Finally, the professor is fed up with the crazy indirect answers and just calls Weizenbaum on the phone directly. At the late hour he is answers sleepily: "Hello" the professor says "Why are you acting so strange tonight?"; Weizenbaum replys "Why is that you are asking me why I am acting so strange?"

I started programming while in high school. At the time 1967, there was no way to do programming at home, there was no internet. I taught myself by reading a 1965 edition of McCracken's A guide to FORTRAN IV programming. The first program I wrote (on paper) was a program to solve linear programming problems using the Simplex algorithm which I had seen a high level description of. I punched up a program to do it on cards using the high school's data entry IBM 026 keypunch machine. I gave the cards to a friend that gave my program to someone over in the school district's administrative building to run on the school districts only computer (I think it was an IBM 1130).

Naturally, my first program didn't work. So it was back to rereading the book on programming and starting out with simpler examples. Turn around time continued to be about 3 days but I viewed programming as a hobby, a bit like being a Ham radio enthusiast. At MIT I continued to view programming as a hobby, but after a while I realized it was worth taking it seriously.

I didn't always do well in my undergraduate classes. I had gone to very bad schools growing up and everything was too easy for me until I got to MIT. I finally learned how to study by the time I got to grad school. Despite this my time there as a student was great. I remember many great professors in addition to Prof. Winston.

Also notable was 6.252 - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Languages. Prof. Dertouzos taught this demanding class. He recommended that I ask a new professor at MIT, Prof. Barbara Liskov (she later went on the be awarded the Turing Award) to be my undergraduate thesis advisor. She changed the way I thought about CS; it was a turning point in my life. I still remember asking her if knowing lambda calculus had any use, lol.

I'm now a senior citizen and next year will have been programming for half a century. I still write code almost every day. By now, I've programmed on every imaginable kind of machine, in every kind of programming language. I've invented important techniques in the field, started a successful publicly traded company, and been very happy with my career choice.

Thanks for the link. I read through the three main papers. Very interesting. The project seems to be dead though. Why hasn't there been any development in the past few years? Did you guys reach a hurdle you couldn't overcome? Or have people's interests shifted? Thanks for taking the time to answer Kenneth.

neat