tag > History
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AI Agents to Model Human Cognition with John Laird, father of Soar
Tom chats with John Laird, who has spent the past 40 years trying to build an AI agent that accomplishes the full range of human cognitive abilities, beginning with his 1980s PhD research on the SOAR model of human cognition with Allen Newell and Paul Rosenbloom.
John E. Laird received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1985, and is John L. Tishman Emeritus Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan. He is one of the original developers of the SOAR architecture and leads its continued development and evolution. He was a founder of Soar Technology. He is a AAAI, ACM, AAAS, and Cognitive Science Society Fellow. In 2018, he was co-winner of the Herbert A. Simon Prize for Advances in Cognitive Systems.
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Oliver Selfridge's Pandemonium (1959)
Images from "Pandemonium: A paradigm for learning by Oliver Selfridge, 1959, in Symposium on the mechanization of thought processes, HM Stationary Office, London.
Selfridge envisioned the mind as a collection of tiny demons, each of whom responds to a name -- or something close to it -- being called out by other demons. When one thinks it is being called, it begins to yell out to other demons. The more certain it is that it is being called, the louder it yells, until some other demon thinks it is being called in turn. And so on. Selfridge called this pandemonium.
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IBM STRETCH/HARVEST (IBM 7950)
The IBM STRETCH/HARVEST (IBM 7950) was a massive, one-of-a-kind, transistorized supercomputer custom-built for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) in 1962. It combined the base computing power of the IBM 7030 (Stretch) with highly specialized cryptanalytic hardware and the pioneering TRACTOR magnetic tape system.
