Textbook of AI

The MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory was founded by John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky in 1959, originally as the Artificial Intelligence Project within MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics. The "AI Lab" name itself dates from a 1970 administrative split from Project MAC, which had absorbed the AI group in 1963 under Robert Fano's leadership and the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) funding initiated by J. C. R. Licklider. For more than four decades the laboratory occupied the upper floors of Tech Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before moving in 2004 to Frank Gehry's Stata Center.

A disproportionate share of early AI

The lab produced a staggering fraction of the AI work of its era. Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA (1966), the first conversational program; Terry Winograd's SHRDLU (1972), which manipulated a blocks-world via natural-language dialogue; Daniel Bobrow's STUDENT (1964), which solved algebra word problems; James Slagle's SAINT (1961), which performed symbolic integration; the Macsyma computer-algebra system (begun 1968), ancestor of Mathematica and Maple; the original LISP machines (Greenblatt, 1973 onwards); Minsky's theory of frames (1974); and Danny Hillis's Connection Machine (1985), a 65,536-processor SIMD parallel computer designed for AI workloads.

Beyond research, the lab seeded much of modern computing culture. Richard Stallman's experience as an AI Lab hacker through the 1970s and early 1980s, and his anger at the breakup of the open hacker community when the LISP machine companies Symbolics and Lisp Machines Inc. commercialised the AI Lab software, directly inspired the GNU Project (1983) and the Free Software Foundation (1985). Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984) devotes its opening chapters to the lab and is the definitive cultural history.

CSAIL and the modern era

In July 2003 the AI Lab merged with the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) to form the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), which remains MIT's primary computing research home and one of the largest such laboratories in the world, with several hundred faculty, students, and research staff. CSAIL has continued to produce significant work in machine learning, robotics, computational biology, computer systems, and theoretical computer science.

Notable affiliates

Faculty and alumni include McCarthy and Minsky themselves, Seymour Papert (co-developer of Logo and constructionist learning theory), Gerald Sussman (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs), Doug Lenat (Cyc), Terry Winograd, Daniel Bobrow, James Slagle, Carl Hewitt (the Actor model), Geoffrey Hinton (briefly, in the early 1980s), Richard Stallman, Danny Hillis, Richard Greenblatt, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, Rodney Brooks, Patrick Winston (long-time director and author of the canonical AI textbook), and many others. Few research institutions in any field can match the lab's record of intellectual influence over American science.