3 ms·

The AI Lab was commonly nicknamed Switzerland, as it was a neutral party between MIT's CS laboratories after they split into two.

hga 10y ago
Not the AI Lab, but Sussman and company's group that sort of stood between the AI Lab and the Lab for Computing Science (LCS), which did more classical types of CS. E.g. artifacts that came from the AI Lab included the Lisp Machine and it's Ethernet style Chaosnet, while LCS was working on a token ring network and aside from their Nu machines and the NuBus, adopted by Apple, never made their own workstations. Or Maclisp (I think at some point) and Scheme, vs. CLU. Other things that came from LCS include RSA and the X window system (the latter due to a weird VAX 11/750 config that DEC created so it could donate them to MIT without suffering (much) from the GSA "Most Favored Customer" requirement to give the Federal government the best price you gave anyone else). After some point Sussman and company created their own informal? unit which stood apart, getting their money from the NSF and using Scheme, and doing their own things, "Switzerland, Armed but Neutral", staying above/aside from the fighting between LCS and the AI Lab. Which as I recall hearing, was only resolved when the head of LCS died (but not before unduly influencing the architecture of their new and highly dysfunctional building), and the head of the AI Lab, who'd saved it when other AI Labs like Stanford's legendary one died, became the head of a combined Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory AKA CSAIL. All the above is 2nd hand but from reliable sources, and remotely after mid-1991.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Ah, thanks. Sorry. I always confuse AI and Switzerland, as both derived from project MAC. Both were important, and are generally more famous than LCS, although LCS was arguably more influential. It doesn't help matters that Switzerland was sometimes called project MAC, which was the original name for the collective. To further confuse matters, https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/mac/ https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/mac/ is the Switzerland website, and it looks like Switzerland is kind of still going, even after the CSAIL merge. Unless the site's just outdated, which is also a possibility.
  - hga 10y ago
    Last time I checked, which was a few years ago but quite some time after the creation of CSAIL, Switzerland was going strong. Last tidbit was their dismay to discover the very high ceiling of the space they were in was a couple or three inches too short per Cambridge zoning rules to subdivide into 2 levels. BTW, it's really hard to understate how horrible a building the Strata Center is for the people inside it who are, you know, trying to get work done, in fact, it's akin and often directly an example of the current open office fad. Or for people trying to get to them, due to it's inherently horrible physical security. In terms of sheer incompetence, though, it's hard to beat creating a loading dock area for mail and freight to replace Building 20's modest facilities that trucks can't actually get into and out of.... After blowing most of almost half a billion on it, MIT has a lot of nerve asking for more money for more buildings. Disclaimer: big fan of Building 20, which served as an indispensable incubator, and allowed me to set up a student run computer center in 1980, there's no place else in the Institute where that would have been vaguely easy, or probably even possible. Yeah, it was a nightmare to maintain, and occupied very valuable space on campus, but there's no excuse for not creating another space to serve the same function, modulo the ease of knocking vertical or horizontal holes, and its extremely high load bearing capability (200 lb/sq ft as I recall). MIT simply won't be creating new groups of people in new fields as fast as it used to.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      Being outside of MIT, I don't exactly know what you're talking about, but it doesn't sound good.
      - tinkerdol 10y ago
        He/she is talking about the newer home of CSAIL, the Stata Center: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_and_Maria_Stata_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_and_Maria_Stata_Center It is notoriously difficult to work in, with way too many open spaces (open in the sense of being public, as well as open in the sense of having random 3-story-high atriums of air above you in some places for no discernable reason) and not enough quiet nooks that are conductive to focused work.

hga 10y ago

Not the AI Lab, but Sussman and company's group that sort of stood between the AI Lab and the Lab for Computing Science (LCS), which did more classical types of CS. E.g. artifacts that came from the AI Lab included the Lisp Machine and it's Ethernet style Chaosnet, while LCS was working on a token ring network and aside from their Nu machines and the NuBus, adopted by Apple, never made their own workstations. Or Maclisp (I think at some point) and Scheme, vs. CLU. Other things that came from LCS include RSA and the X window system (the latter due to a weird VAX 11/750 config that DEC created so it could donate them to MIT without suffering (much) from the GSA "Most Favored Customer" requirement to give the Federal government the best price you gave anyone else). After some point Sussman and company created their own informal? unit which stood apart, getting their money from the NSF and using Scheme, and doing their own things, "Switzerland, Armed but Neutral", staying above/aside from the fighting between LCS and the AI Lab. Which as I recall hearing, was only resolved when the head of LCS died (but not before unduly influencing the architecture of their new and highly dysfunctional building), and the head of the AI Lab, who'd saved it when other AI Labs like Stanford's legendary one died, became the head of a combined Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory AKA CSAIL. All the above is 2nd hand but from reliable sources, and remotely after mid-1991.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Ah, thanks. Sorry. I always confuse AI and Switzerland, as both derived from project MAC. Both were important, and are generally more famous than LCS, although LCS was arguably more influential. It doesn't help matters that Switzerland was sometimes called project MAC, which was the original name for the collective. To further confuse matters, https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/mac/ https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/mac/ is the Switzerland website, and it looks like Switzerland is kind of still going, even after the CSAIL merge. Unless the site's just outdated, which is also a possibility.
- hga 10y ago
  Last time I checked, which was a few years ago but quite some time after the creation of CSAIL, Switzerland was going strong. Last tidbit was their dismay to discover the very high ceiling of the space they were in was a couple or three inches too short per Cambridge zoning rules to subdivide into 2 levels. BTW, it's really hard to understate how horrible a building the Strata Center is for the people inside it who are, you know, trying to get work done, in fact, it's akin and often directly an example of the current open office fad. Or for people trying to get to them, due to it's inherently horrible physical security. In terms of sheer incompetence, though, it's hard to beat creating a loading dock area for mail and freight to replace Building 20's modest facilities that trucks can't actually get into and out of.... After blowing most of almost half a billion on it, MIT has a lot of nerve asking for more money for more buildings. Disclaimer: big fan of Building 20, which served as an indispensable incubator, and allowed me to set up a student run computer center in 1980, there's no place else in the Institute where that would have been vaguely easy, or probably even possible. Yeah, it was a nightmare to maintain, and occupied very valuable space on campus, but there's no excuse for not creating another space to serve the same function, modulo the ease of knocking vertical or horizontal holes, and its extremely high load bearing capability (200 lb/sq ft as I recall). MIT simply won't be creating new groups of people in new fields as fast as it used to.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    Being outside of MIT, I don't exactly know what you're talking about, but it doesn't sound good.
    - tinkerdol 10y ago
      He/she is talking about the newer home of CSAIL, the Stata Center: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_and_Maria_Stata_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_and_Maria_Stata_Center It is notoriously difficult to work in, with way too many open spaces (open in the sense of being public, as well as open in the sense of having random 3-story-high atriums of air above you in some places for no discernable reason) and not enough quiet nooks that are conductive to focused work.