W. Daniel Hillis
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William Daniel Hillis, Ph.D. (born September 25, 1956, in Baltimore, Maryland) an American inventor, scientist, author and engineer.
Danny Hillis built a computer that played tic-tac-toe made of tinkertoys while a student at MIT. This accomplishment was mentioned obliquely in K. Eric Drexler's book Engines of Creation. Hillis is a member of the Global Business Network and founded Thinking Machines which developed the Connection Machine; a computer that employs parallel distributed processing (PDP). Hillis is also the cofounder, with Stewart Brand, of the Long Now Foundation. He recently wrote The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work (Basic Books, 1998 ISBN 0-465-02595-1).
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[edit] Biography
modified from a GFDL bio by Ben Goertzel, published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine in 2001
Hillis has a broad range of interests. He’s building a clock, the Clock of the Long Now, intended to last ten thousand years. However, he is also working on more practical commercial projects, having resigned a job as a Disney imagineer to start Applied Minds, a company providing hardware, software, and engineering technology and consulting to Fortune 500 companies and the defense industry.
Hillis' biggest stab at fame and fortune was Thinking Machines Inc., a firm that lasted 11 years, created the world’s fastest parallel computing hardware at the time, yet failed to either create a thinking computer program or make Hillis fabulously wealthy. Hillis seems relatively unruffled by this. His visionary prognostications lack the alarmism of Bill Joy or Jaron Lanier, and also avoid the starry-eyed enthusiasm of Ray Kurzweil. He comes across, in person and in his writings, as a mild-mannered, curious and creative guy. Although he is comfortable talking about business, in many ways, he still remains delighted with the task of building the next cool gadget or intricate algorithm, and looking forward to the gadgets and algorithms of the next millennia in a remarkably matter-of-fact way.
[edit] Early life
Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1956, his father was an US Air Force epidemiologist. The family moved frequently on the trail of hepatitis outbreaks, so he grew up with no fixed home. Moving from place to place in Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire, and Kenya, he avoided formal schooling and the pressures for social conformity that go along with it. As he says, "we were typically out in the middle of the jungle so I was just taught at home." His mother did most of the teaching and her interest in mathematics jibed well with his natural abilities. His father encouraged him to study biology, a pursuit that gave him an early appreciation for the complex machines that are living organisms. "My best biological experiment," he says, "was tissue culturing a frog heart and keeping the heart beating even while it was growing in the test tube. It was amazing to me that somehow they got together and did this coordinated activity even though they were just this homogenized mass of cells." Much of his career was spent creating complex computer systems capable of displaying spontaneous coordinated activity, like the cells in a frog heart.
He graduated with an undergraduate math degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1978, followed by an MIT SM degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) three years later, specializing in robotics. Along the way he pursued his interest in toys and showed an entrepreneurial streak - working at the MIT Logo Laboratory developing computer hardware and software for children, designing computer-oriented toys and games for the Milton Bradley Company, and co-founding Terrapin Inc., a producer of computer software for elementary schools. For his doctoral work, Hillis designed the Connection Machine, a massively parallel computer built as a platform for artificial intelligence and simulation of complex physical systems. Hillis completed his PhD in EECS from MIT in 1988, under Gerald Jay Sussman.
[edit] Hillis in the early days of Parallel Computing
Ordinary computers are "serial" – they have only a single processor and hence they can carry out only one operation at a time. The trick is that they’re fast – a single operation can be done very, very quickly. So a computer can give the illusion of doing many things at once – say, running a game while downloading email while showing an animation – when in fact its processor’s time is swapping back and forth from one task to another quite rapidly. The human brain, on the other hand, has around a hundred billion neurons, and in principle all of the brain's neurons are working in parallel, simultaneously. Each one of them acts much more slowly than a computer processor, but what they lack in speed they make up for in bulk and in parallelism. Hillis’ Connection Machine was an elegant compromise, the nature of which changed over time as computer hardware technology evolved. The idea was to make a computer whose processors were fast like those of ordinary computers, but also massively parallel like in a brain. In this way, one could have the best of both worlds, and one could build a really intelligent system with perhaps hundreds of thousands or millions of computer processors tightly linked together.
The biggest Connection Machine ever built had 65,536 processors, and a 131,072 processor version was fully designed. While 131,072 processors is far short of the number of neurons in the brain, this still pushes towards a workable compromise between traditional computing and brain-style information processing. Other parallel processing machines, like the Cray supercomputers, are specialized and inflexible, focused on doing the same exact operation on a large amount of data all at once, and had only a relatively small number of highly specialized processors. Hillis’ system, on the other hand, had the flexibility of the brain – each processor could do what it wanted when it wanted – which led to the possibility of computational chaos, intelligent coordinated activity, or most intriguing, the combination of the two.
Thinking Machines Inc., founded in 1983 while Hillis was in the middle of his MIT doctoral work, was a remarkable organization. At its peak the research staff, about half the corporation, numbered in the hundreds. Despite the name of the company, there was not a coordinated company-wide research and development program aimed at making the Connection Machine think. Rather, there was a variety of research groups aimed at doing all sorts of different things with the Connection Machine, ranging from artificial intelligence research to simulation of fluid flow, computational immunology, experimental mathematics – and more. Astrophysics, aircraft design, financial analysis, genetics, computer graphics, medical imaging, image understanding, neurobiology, material science, cryptography, subatomic physics. Work on data mining – the automatic analysis of large and complex data sets – was particularly successful and later became a central part of the company’s business.
The motivation underlying this diverse approach was simplistic but ambitious. Hillis says:
Clearly, the organizing principle of the brain is parallelism. It's using massive parallelism. The information is in the connection between a lot of very simple parallel units working together. So if we built a computer that was more along that system of organization, it would likely be able to do the same kinds of things the brain does.
[edit] Hillis's philosophy of mind
Hillis' approach to building artificial intelligence (AI) presupposes that parallelism itself is something close to the chief ingredient of intelligence – that there is no further "secret sauce" required to make a mind come out of a distributed network of processors. Hillis believes that "intelligence is just a whole lot of little things, thousands of them. And what will happen is we'll learn about each one at a time, and as we do it, machines will be more and more like people. It will be a gradual process, and that's been happening."
This is not so far off from Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind theory, which holds that the mind is a collection of agents, each one taking care of a particular aspect of intelligence, and communicating with one another, exchanging information as required. Some AI theorists hold other views – some maintain that it’s not the underlying computational mode that’s crucial, but rather that there are particular algorithms (of reasoning, memory, perception, etc.) that are really the key. Others argue that the right combination of "little things" is needed to give rise to the overall emergent patterns of coordinated activity that constitute real intelligence. But Hillis’s philosophy is a plausible one, and he had built a hardware platform and an organization well suited to validating or refuting his theory through ongoing engineering and research work. Most AI research is far less ambitious, consisting of small-scale, detailed work on one or another particular aspect of intelligence. In the history of AI, Hillis stands as one of a very small number of people who made a serious attempt to actually create a thinking machine.
[edit] The demise of Thinking Machines Inc.
Networking large numbers of relatively ordinary machines together, one had distributed computing, different from parallel computing in design, but with results that could rival a supercomputer at a far lower cost. Networks, then, began to herald the demise of Thinking Machines. The last Connection Machine designed, the CM-5, was something like a computer network internally – it consisted of standard Sun Microsystems SPARC processors hard-wired together. This was a big change from the earlier Connection Machines, which had been unique on the processor level as well as on the level of overall system architecture. In the end, Thinking Machines Inc. revised its business model, abandoning hardware altogether, focusing on selling their data mining software for use on distributed computing system composed of ordinary computers.
In 1994, the firm dispersed. The hardware side of Thinking Machines Inc. ended up at Sun Microsystems. Much of the data mining group ended up at Dun & Bradstreet. Several Thinking Machines executives started Continuum (later renamed Topical Net), a company building text categorization software. Co-founder Sheryl Handler (company president) and several technical leads from TMC founded Ab Initio, a company focusing on parallel computing for large data warehouses. Others left to found Alexa and later the Internet Archive. And Hillis, after a stint working with the MIT Media Lab, took a job as vice-president of Walt Disney Imagineering, the research and development arm of The Walt Disney Company.
[edit] Businessman
Hillis entered this new phase of his career with wide-eyed optimism. "I've wanted to work at Disney ever since I was a child," he said. "I remember listening to Walt Disney on television describing the 'Imagineers' who designed Disneyland. I decided then that someday I would be an Imagineer. Later, I became interested in a different kind of magic - the magic of computers. Now I finally have the perfect job - bringing computer magic into Disney."
After Thinking Machines, his scientific work was becoming more practical in orientation – he was designing new technologies to underlie games and theme park rides rather than working directly toward digital intelligence. But at the same time, his philosophical side was hardly dormant. The far distant future came to occupy his thoughts more and more. These thoughts would eventually lead Hillis to found the Long Now Foundation [1] and the Clock of the Long Now [2].
The clock got all the media attention, but for Hillis personally it was never difficult to retell the story. Disney is a huge organization, and carrying exciting projects from concept to real-world implementation, without layers of bureaucracy getting in the way, probably wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. Finally Hillis left Disney, taking with him Bran Ferren, the head of the Imagineering group.
Ferren shares Hillis’s visionary streak, and also his interest in millennial time. Ferren and Hillis are exploring new directions via their new start-up Applied Minds, a company aimed at providing technology and consulting services to entertainment firms, presumably including Hillis's former employer, The Walt Disney Company.
Having spent most of his career at the intersection between business and science, Hillis is acutely aware of the difficulties of balancing the different goals of these very different enterprises. There was a transition in the life of Thinking Machines, he observes, when it became less of a research and development shop and more of a real business – and at that point it became more and more difficult to move toward the goal of building real artificial intelligence. When the firm became a real business, efficiency became important - but creativity is exploratory, evolutionary, and fundamentally inefficient. In a company narrowly focused on making money, every minute of everyone’s day must be judged by whether it contributes to the bottom line. But the nature of the creative process is such that it just can’t be judged until it’s finished – there’s no way to tell which train of thought or experimentation is going to lead to useful and marketable results.
What appealed to him about Disney, when he started out there, was the fact that it was a real business that was making real efforts to keep creativity alive within its walls. This was the express purpose of the Imagineering group. The defection of Hillis and Ferren, however, may have been an indication that Disney’s efforts in this regard have not been entirely successful. Applied Minds is a fascinating venture, which one suspects has done a better job of combining creativity with business than was possible inside Disney. It is, however, worth noting how Hillis’s efforts have split: between the Clock of the Long Now and Applied Minds each embody different aspects of his mind and soul, which were fused together in his earlier work with Thinking Machines.
Hillis was one of the few commentators who publicly predicted that Y2K bugs would cause no significant problems (see "Why Do We Buy the Myth of Y2K?", Newsweek, May 31, 1999).
[edit] The Long Now Foundation and the Clock of the Long Now
In 1993, with Thinking Machines facing its imminent demise, Hillis wrote the following manifesto:
When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. Now, thirty years later, they still talk about what will happen by the year 2000. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of the Millennium. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.
In 1995, Hillis wrote an article for Wired Magazine about the possibility of a clock that would last over 10,000 years. This clock became the Clock of the Long Now, a name coined by the songwriter and composer, Brian Eno. The project led directly to the founding of the Long Now Foundation[3] by Hillis and such luminaries as Stewart Brand, Brian Eno, Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor, and others.
The Clock of the Long Now also became the subject of a book by Long Now Foundation founder Stewart Brand, entitled The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility: The Ideas Behind the World's Slowest Computer (ISBN 0-465-00780-5) in 2000.
The Long Now Foundation, though founded with the Clock of the Long Now, sponsors other "long view" projects such as the Rosetta Project[4].
[edit] The future
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As Applied Minds becomes a more and more profitable business, then it will be able to fund more and more interesting research over time. It will be interesting to see what happens in this regard. By remaining at Disney through the whole Internet bubble, Hillis missed out on his chance to cash in on the tech boom while it lasted. And given Disney stock’s poor performance in recent years, Disney stock options presumably weren’t a wonderful thing to own. The end-game of Thinking Machines Inc. did not result in making Hillis tremendously rich either. So, Hillis has a nice, newly built house with a tennis court and pet donkey. But he isn’t currently in a financial position to build amazing new things on his own dollar. If Applied Minds puts him in this position, who knows what will emerge?
Perhaps something as fantastic as Thinking Machines Inc. – which remains the high point of Hillis’s story. It was a fascinating enterprise in many ways, but largely because of the way it fused science and business in the service of a single, immensely ambitious initiative. The Connection Machine was too big of a project to be initiated outside of industry, yet too innovative to be done without a large team of visionary scientists. The things Hillis is involved in now are less paradoxical and complex, and ultimately for that reason perhaps a little less intriguing. The Clock of the Long Now is a great work of conceptual art, with deep philosophical overtones and involving some neat engineering problems. Applied Minds is a real business through and through, using new science as required to provide customer solutions. These are both intriguing and sensible things, and yet they lack the Don Quixote–ish majesty of Thinking Machines Inc. and the Connection Machine, which to this day stand as Hillis’s greatest creations.
A story like this reminds us that business, science, engineering and art are not fundamental divisions of the universe, any more so than earth, air, fire and water. Great innovations and enterprises stand outside these divisions, because they are crystallized around concepts that go beyond the temporary structures of any one human culture and society. The human race’s urge to create intelligence beyond itself – whether through building AI machines or through, as Hillis has recently discussed, putting "chips in the brain" – is a fundamental force that cuts across categories of human endeavor. Our need to understand our relationship with time is a similar fundamental force. And some human beings – like Danny Hillis – and some human organizations –like Thinking Machines and, to a lesser extent the Long Now Foundation - reflect these fundamental forces in particularly elegant and powerful ways. To paraphrase what Hillis said about the frog’s heart he experimented with as a youth, it is remarkable that we can "do this coordinated activity... even though we are just a mass of cells."
[edit] "The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work"
In "The Pattern on the Stone", Hillis simplifies the interworkings of the computer into separate building blocks. He clearly explains many difficult concepts to the reader using examples and diagrams. These concepts, such as Finite-State Machines and Boolean Logic, come together in Hillis’ explanations of programming and algorithms. These words, which are abstract to the majority of the public, are given meaning to the reader in an entertaining and noninstructional method. Hillis concludes the book with a discussion on the future of computers, including the possible evolution of the hierarchal structure, human simulation, and the development of quantum computers.
[edit] External links
- Original Goertzel bio
- Applied Minds, Inc.
- John Battelle's Searchblog: A Morning with Danny Hillis
- Hillis's Biography at The Long Now Foundation
- The Mind of an Inventor Newsweek, 10 October 2005 issue
- The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines Corporation, Inc. Magazine, September 1995
- Metaweb Technologies, Inc., a spinoff of Applied Minds
