Textbook of AI

1947–, Computer scientist, AI researcher

Also known as: Gerald Jay Sussman

Gerald Jay Sussman is an American computer scientist whose 1973 MIT PhD thesis produced HACKER, a program that wrote and debugged plans for blocks-world tasks by recognising and patching its own bugs. HACKER's architecture introduced the idea that problem solving consists largely of debugging, repeatedly running an imperfect plan, detecting failures, and patching the problematic step, a paradigm now ubiquitous in modern reinforcement learning and program synthesis.

With Hal Abelson, Sussman wrote Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP, 1984), one of the most influential undergraduate computer-science textbooks ever written. With Guy Steele he designed Scheme (1975), a minimalist Lisp dialect that introduced first-class continuations, lexical scope and tail-call optimisation. He has remained on the MIT faculty for fifty years and continues to work on the use of computational methods in classical mechanics and electrical engineering.