Marvin Minsky, a legendary figure in artificial intelligence (AI) research, died on 24 January. Numerous obituaries have been published to pay tribute since then. Also in tribute to Minsky, a 25-minute interview with him done by Ray Kurzweil himself in 2010 was published on Kurzweil’s portal.
Press release
At the age of 88, Marvin Minsky, one of the great pioneers of artificial intelligence research, passed away on 24 January.
Robert Williams from Michigan was the first human to be killed by a robot. The accident happened to the 25-year-old man at Ford Motors on 25 January 1979.
Internet Explorer died officially on 12 January as Microsoft no longer provides support for the twenty-year-old web browser.
In the 1940s, ENIAC, taking up an entire room, could only operate with heavy air-conditioning on. To be able to perform different tasks, cables had to be rearranged, but ENIAC could calculate faster than any of its rivals. The most famous ENIAC programmers were women, but instead of calculating artillery trajectories, it helped to do calculations for Ede Teller’s hydrogen bomb. It was struck by lightning in 1955.
Co-operation between British and American secret services on the one hand and telecommunication companies on the other goes back to the early 20th century. Best seller writer James Bamford did years of research in the field and shared the most important pieces of information at the 31st Chaos Communication Congress (31C3) in Hamburg. He had his book, The Puzzle Palace published in 1982, which was the first book ever about the National Security Agency (NSA) of the USA.
Luther George Simjian, the inventor of ATM, was born on 28 January 1905 (Gaziantep) to poor Armenian parents, in the territory of the Ottoman Empire. At the age of 14, Simjian said farewell to his parents and through Beirut he fled to Western Europe, which he left in 1920 for the United States, where he emigrated and settled.
On 16 January in 1956, the United States publicly disclosed the existence of an air defence system (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment – SAGE) that had been developed in response to the cold war.
The Manchester Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI, www.mosi.org.uk) and the multinational Renishow, a company in the field of measurement, motion control and high precision machining, have jointly organised a 3D printing exhibition, which can be visited free of admission fee. (Needless to say that Renishow has a 3DP unit.)