6 ms·

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

by 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 Unless the site's just outdated, which is also a possibility.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
        Ah, yeah, sorry about that qwertyuiop924, and thank you tinkerdol for filling him in sooner, and confirming what I've heard from other sources. It shows every sign of being a two for one own goal in diminishing MIT's future ability to "be MIT".
        qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        Ouch. Yeah, that would suck. But then, IIRC, people have been saying that X is dimishing MIT's future ability to be MIT since before the death of 6.001. I suspect it's another manifestation of the same kind of human impulse that makes the elders of every generation decry the youth of the next ones. And a bad building design isn't impossible to work around, just very, very, very, very inconvenient. But then, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
        hga 10y ago
        There's 2 things here: The incubator that was Building 20 was is gone, as far as I know. Many many good things came out of it, some of which got very big, starting with the Research Lab For Electronics right after WWII (it was previously the main building for the "MIT Radiation Lab", i.e. a place to prototype and in some cases build small lots of RADARs). As of the '80s, some of its 3 phase ceiling busbars were still live, one of my favorite professor's coffepot ran straight off one. That's a relatively subtle thing, but to the extent MIT becomes stolid and not doing new things, becomes more of a place run by consensus and the conventional wisdom, that would be an important thing to look at. The second is of course the Stata Building. It will absolutely diminish the useful output of what's now CSAIL, if for no other reason than those who need to be able to work without distraction by and large won't be able to in the building. It's the sort of thing that can put a ceiling on the difficultly of projects people will be able to do, if they can't get into or stay long enough in flow. Obviously people will work around this, using e.g. laptops in quiet places, but collaboration will then seriously suffer if past research on the subject is of any validity (e.g. > 30 feet? or a stairway makes a big difference). I don't know if anyone was out to get them, it's just that a) people who had weird and very wrong ideas about how to do things, like the head of the LCS, who among many other things tried to physically enshrine a permanent disconnection between CS and AI, b) people who simply didn't give a shit about those who really were going to use it, and/or c) people who were grossly incompetent, were in charge of getting it designed and built, but not the actual "users". And the screwups are legion. Tom Knight, #1 Lisp Machine designer back in the day and someone who did a lot of important stuff, now a "synthetic biologist" AKA into artificial life, asked for one thing, a floor that sloped to a drain. Which he didn't get. And I now notice as of 2008 he's doing this at a company he co-founded. I suspect those two fact are not entirely coincidental. And potentially a grave loss to MIT, that part of the future just might not be done there, losing "The Godfather of Synthetic Biology" per Wikipedia is not a small thing. And I have the tiniest window into CSAIL, and can speak freely about it (my one theoretically vulnerable source isn't really, and hasn't told me anything I can't repeat), there's I'm sure much much more to be told, and sifted through by historians or archaeologists of science someday. 6.001 is a rather different thing, after the dot.com crash, which resulted in a crash of EECS undergraduate enrollment, less than half after being 40% of the student body for decades, people panicked, those with an agenda against Scheme/LISP used the opening, but primarily, MIT decided an MIT EECS degree was going to be a fundamentally different thing. That doesn't mean they're wrong, just that if you're looking a focus on the 6.001/SICP sort of thing, you might want to look elsewhere, like CMU I think. And maybe this was inevitable, a department like MIT's or UCB's is simply never going to be the same as a CS focused department that didn't grow out of an EE one. And Sussman at least always thought the 2 subjects were both of great importance and should be taught together, he himself just never figured out a way to really make that work, including at least one experimental one year long course covering both prior to the development of SICP and the 4 6.001-4 courses.

by hga 10y ago

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
      Ah, yeah, sorry about that qwertyuiop924, and thank you tinkerdol for filling him in sooner, and confirming what I've heard from other sources. It shows every sign of being a two for one own goal in diminishing MIT's future ability to "be MIT".
      - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        Ouch. Yeah, that would suck. But then, IIRC, people have been saying that X is dimishing MIT's future ability to be MIT since before the death of 6.001. I suspect it's another manifestation of the same kind of human impulse that makes the elders of every generation decry the youth of the next ones. And a bad building design isn't impossible to work around, just very, very, very, very inconvenient. But then, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
        hga 10y ago
        There's 2 things here: The incubator that was Building 20 was is gone, as far as I know. Many many good things came out of it, some of which got very big, starting with the Research Lab For Electronics right after WWII (it was previously the main building for the "MIT Radiation Lab", i.e. a place to prototype and in some cases build small lots of RADARs). As of the '80s, some of its 3 phase ceiling busbars were still live, one of my favorite professor's coffepot ran straight off one. That's a relatively subtle thing, but to the extent MIT becomes stolid and not doing new things, becomes more of a place run by consensus and the conventional wisdom, that would be an important thing to look at. The second is of course the Stata Building. It will absolutely diminish the useful output of what's now CSAIL, if for no other reason than those who need to be able to work without distraction by and large won't be able to in the building. It's the sort of thing that can put a ceiling on the difficultly of projects people will be able to do, if they can't get into or stay long enough in flow. Obviously people will work around this, using e.g. laptops in quiet places, but collaboration will then seriously suffer if past research on the subject is of any validity (e.g. > 30 feet? or a stairway makes a big difference). I don't know if anyone was out to get them, it's just that a) people who had weird and very wrong ideas about how to do things, like the head of the LCS, who among many other things tried to physically enshrine a permanent disconnection between CS and AI, b) people who simply didn't give a shit about those who really were going to use it, and/or c) people who were grossly incompetent, were in charge of getting it designed and built, but not the actual "users". And the screwups are legion. Tom Knight, #1 Lisp Machine designer back in the day and someone who did a lot of important stuff, now a "synthetic biologist" AKA into artificial life, asked for one thing, a floor that sloped to a drain. Which he didn't get. And I now notice as of 2008 he's doing this at a company he co-founded. I suspect those two fact are not entirely coincidental. And potentially a grave loss to MIT, that part of the future just might not be done there, losing "The Godfather of Synthetic Biology" per Wikipedia is not a small thing. And I have the tiniest window into CSAIL, and can speak freely about it (my one theoretically vulnerable source isn't really, and hasn't told me anything I can't repeat), there's I'm sure much much more to be told, and sifted through by historians or archaeologists of science someday. 6.001 is a rather different thing, after the dot.com crash, which resulted in a crash of EECS undergraduate enrollment, less than half after being 40% of the student body for decades, people panicked, those with an agenda against Scheme/LISP used the opening, but primarily, MIT decided an MIT EECS degree was going to be a fundamentally different thing. That doesn't mean they're wrong, just that if you're looking a focus on the 6.001/SICP sort of thing, you might want to look elsewhere, like CMU I think. And maybe this was inevitable, a department like MIT's or UCB's is simply never going to be the same as a CS focused department that didn't grow out of an EE one. And Sussman at least always thought the 2 subjects were both of great importance and should be taught together, he himself just never figured out a way to really make that work, including at least one experimental one year long course covering both prior to the development of SICP and the 4 6.001-4 courses.