W. Daniel Hillis (born September 25, 1956, in Baltimore, Maryland) an American inventor, scientist, author and engineer. September 25 is the 268th day of the year (269th in leap years). ... 1956 (MCMLVI) was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... This article is about the city in the US state of Maryland. ... Official language(s) None Capital Annapolis Largest city Baltimore Area  - Total  - Width  - Length  - % water  - Latitude  - Longitude Ranked 42nd 32,160 km² 145 km 400 km 21 37°53N to 39°43N 75°4W to 79°33W Population  - Total (2000)  - Density Ranked 19th 5,296,486 165...

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 0465025951). Tic-tac-toe, also called noughts and crosses and many other names, is a paper and pencil game between two players, O and X, who alternate in marking the spaces in a 3×3 board. ... The Tinkertoy Construction Set was created in 1914—one year after the A. C. Gilbert Companys Erector Set—by Charles H. Pajeau and Robert Pettit in Evanston, Illinois. ... The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is a research and educational institution located in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. MIT is a world leader in science and technology, as well as in many other fields, including management, economics, linguistics, political science, and philosophy. ... Kim Eric Drexler (born April 25, 1955) is an American engineer best known for popularizing the potential of hypothetical molecular nanotechnology. ... Engines of Creation (ISBN 0-385-19973-2) is a seminal molecular nanotechnology book written by K. Eric Drexler in 1986. ... The Global Business Network is a consultancy firm that advises businesses on possible future scenarios. ... Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer founded in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1982 by W. Daniel Hillis and Sheryl Handler to turn Hilliss doctoral work at MIT on massively parallel computing architectures into a commercial product called the Connection Machine. ... Thinking Machines CM-2 at the Computing Museum in San Jose. ... A computer is a machine for manipulating data according to a list of instructions - a program. ... Connectionism today generally refers to an approach in the fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science and philosophy of mind which models mental or behavioral phenomena with neural networks, and is associated with a certain set of arguments for why this is a good idea. ... Stewart Brand speaking September 5, 2004 Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938 in Rockford, Illinois) is an author, editor, and creator of The Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly. ... The Long Now Foundation was established in 1996. ... 1998 (MCMXCVIII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Ocean. ...

Biography

modified from a GFDL bio by Ben Goertzel, published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine in 2001 The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) is an influential high-quality national German newspaper, founded in 1949. ...

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. The Clock of the Long Now, also called the 10,000-year clock, is a mechanical clock designed to keep time for 10,000 years. ... Alternate meanings: Disney (disambiguation) The Walt Disney Company (also known as Disney Enterprises, Inc. ... WED Enterprises (WED), was formed as a separate company from Walt Disney Studios by Walt Disney in the late 1940s/early 1950s. ... Applied Minds is a company founded by ex-Disney Imagineers Danny Hillis and Bran Ferren that provides technology and consulting services to entertainment firms (presumably including Disney), Herman Miller, and Harris Corporation. ... The Fortune 500 is a ranking of the top 500 United States corporations as measured by gross revenue. ... The defense industry refers primarily to: Defense contractors: business organizations or individuals that provide products or services to a defense department of a government. ...

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. Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer founded in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1982 by W. Daniel Hillis and Sheryl Handler to turn Hilliss doctoral work at MIT on massively parallel computing architectures into a commercial product called the Connection Machine. ... William Nelson Joy (born 1954), commonly known as Bill Joy, co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003. ... Jaron Lanier (born 1960) is an artist, musician, inventor, virtual reality developer, film director, public speaker, and member of the Global Business Network. ... Dr. Raymond Kurzweil (born February 12, 1948) is a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic musical keyboards. ...

Early life

Hillis’ early life prepared him well for the tumultuousness of the technology industry. Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1956, his father was an US Air Force epidemiologist, so the family moved frequently on the trail of hepatitis outbreaks, and 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. This article is about the city in the US state of Maryland. ... Official language(s) None Capital Annapolis Largest city Baltimore Area  - Total  - Width  - Length  - % water  - Latitude  - Longitude Ranked 42nd 32,160 km² 145 km 400 km 21 37°53N to 39°43N 75°4W to 79°33W Population  - Total (2000)  - Density Ranked 19th 5,296,486 165... Seal of the Air Force. ... Epidemiology (Greek epi = upon, among; demos = people, district; logos = word, discourse), defined literally, is the study of epidemics in humans. ... Hepatitis is a gastroenterological disease, featuring inflammation of the liver. ... Mathematics is often defined as the study of topics such as quantity, structure, space, and change. ... Biology is the branch of science dealing with the study of life. ...

His education is about what you’d expect – an undergraduate math degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1978, followed by a MIT master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) three years later, specializing in robotics. Along the way he found time to pursue his interest in toys and to indulge his 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 began the endeavor that has been his greatest contribution to science and humanity so far – his work on the Connection Machine, a massively parallel computer going far beyond any other computer system of the time in terms of its potential for artificial intelligence, simulation of complex physical systems. Hillis completed his PhD in EECS from MIT in 1988. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is a university located in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. MIT is one of the worlds leading research institutions in science and technology, as well as in numerous other fields, including management, economics, linguistics, political science, and philosophy. ... EECS is an abbreviation for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, used in universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with robot. ... The Logo programming language is an imperative programming language. ... Milton Bradley (1836 - 1911) was a game pioneer, credited by many with launching the game industry in North America. ... Thinking Machines CM-2 at the Computing Museum in San Jose. ... PhD usually refers to the academic title Doctor of Philosophy PhD can also refer to the manga Phantasy Degree This is a disambiguation page — a list of pages that otherwise might share the same title. ... EECS is an abbreviation for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, used in universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley. ... The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is a university located in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. MIT is one of the worlds leading research institutions in science and technology, as well as in numerous other fields, including management, economics, linguistics, political science, and philosophy. ...

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. Comparative brain sizes In animals, the brain, or encephalon (Greek for in the head), is the control center of the central nervous system. ... Thinking Machines CM-2 at the Computing Museum in San Jose. ...

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. For alternate meanings, see Cray (disambiguation). ...

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. Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer founded in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1982 by W. Daniel Hillis and Sheryl Handler to turn Hilliss doctoral work at MIT on massively parallel computing architectures into a commercial product called the Connection Machine. ... Hondas intelligent humanoid robot Artificial intelligence (AI) is defined as intelligence exhibited by an artificial entity. ... This article or section should be merged with Fluid mechanics Fluid dynamics is the study of fluids (liquids and gases) in motion, and the effect of the fluid motion on fluid boundaries, such as solid containers or other fluids. ... Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) are computer algorithms inspired by the principles and processes of the vertebrate immune system. ... Mathematics is often defined as the study of topics such as quantity, structure, space, and change. ... Spiral Galaxy ESO 269-57 Astrophysics is the tree of astronomy that deals with the physics of the universe, including the physical properties (luminosity, density, temperature and chemical composition) of astronomical objects such as stars, galaxies, and the interstellar medium, as well as their interactions. ... Genetics (from the Greek genno γεννώ= give birth) is the science of genes, heredity, and the variation of organisms. ... Medical imaging is the process by which physicians evaluate an area of the subjects body that is not normally visible. ... Neuroscience is a field of study which deals with the structure, function, development, genetics, biochemistry, physiology, pharmacology and pathology of the nervous system. ... Materials science includes those parts of chemistry and physics that deal with the properties of materials. ... The German Lorenz cipher machine Cryptography or cryptology is a field of mathematics and computer science concerned with information security and related issues, particularly encryption. ... Data Mining, also known as Knowledge-Discovery in Databases (KDD), is the process of automatically searching large volumes of data for patterns. ...

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.

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. Marvin Lee Minsky (born August 9, 1927), sometimes affectionately known as Old Man Minsky, is an American scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of MITs AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy. ... This article or section should be merged with Society of Mind Marvin Minskys theory of the Society of Mind asserts that the mind is the product of the interaction of a vast society of distinct and individually simple processes known as agents. ...

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. Sun Microsystems, Inc. ... Sun UltraSPARC II Microprocessor Sun UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara 8 Core) SPARC (Scalable Processor ARChitecture) is a pure big-endian RISC microprocessor architecture originally designed in 1985 by Sun Microsystems. ...

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. And Hillis, after a stint working with the MIT Media Lab, took at job as vice-president of Walt Disney Imagineering, the research and development arm of The Walt Disney Company. Sun Microsystems, Inc. ... The Dun & Bradstreet Corp (NYSE: DNB), headquartered in Short Hills, New Jersey, USA, is among the leading providers of business information on business. ... The Latin term ab initio means from the beginning and is used in several contexts: when describing literature: told from the beginning as opposed to in medias res (meaning starting in the middle of the story). ... The Wiesner Buildings Atrium The MIT Media Lab in the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology engages in education and research in the digital technology used for expression and communication. ... Walt Disney Imagineering, was formed by entertainment mogul Walt Disney on December 16, 1952 as WED Enterprises to develop plans for a theme park and to manage Disneys personal assets. ... The Walt Disney Company (most commonly known as Disney) (NYSE: DIS) is one of the largest media and entertainment corporations in the world. ...

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 Long Now Foundation was established in 1996. ... The Clock of the Long Now, also called the 10,000-year clock, is a mechanical clock designed to keep time for 10,000 years. ...

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 millenial 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. Applied Minds is a company founded by ex-Disney Imagineers Danny Hillis and Bran Ferren that provides technology and consulting services to entertainment firms (presumably including Disney), Herman Miller, and Harris Corporation. ... The Walt Disney Company (most commonly known as Disney) (NYSE: DIS) is one of the largest media and entertainment corporations in the world. ...

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 an 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). The year 2000 problem (also known as the Y2K problem and the millennium bug) was a flaw in computer program design that caused some date-related processing to operate incorrectly for dates and times on and after January 1, 2000. ... The Newsweek logo Newsweek is a weekly news magazine published in New York City and distributed throughout the United States and internationally. ...

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. A millennium is a period of time, equal to one thousand years (from Latin mille, thousand, and annum, year). ... Stonehenge Stonehenge is a Neolithic and Bronze Age megalithic monument located near Avebury in the English county of Wiltshire, about 8 miles (13 km) northwest of Salisbury. ...

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 the Long Now Foundation[3] by Hillis and such luminaries as Stewart Brand, Brian Eno, Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor, and others. Brian Eno in 1977 Brian Peter George St. ... The Long Now Foundation was established in 1996. ... Stewart Brand speaking September 5, 2004 Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938 in Rockford, Illinois) is an author, editor, and creator of The Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly. ... Brian Eno in 1977 Brian Peter George St. ... Esther Dyson (born 14 July 1951) is the daughter of Freeman Dyson and a noted consultant and philosopher in the field of emerging digital technology. ... Mitch Kapor Mitch Kapor (centre) with Bill Gates and Fred Gibbons, during their time working on developing applications for the Apple Macintosh, 1984 Mitchell David Kapor (born 1950) is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the killer application often credited with making...

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 0465007805) 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]. The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone to last from 2000 to 2100. ...

The future

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 house, the back yard facing a beautiful lake, and is having an even nicer one built. 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 cells2."

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