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43-664: Danny Hillis and Sheryl Handler founded Thinking Machines Corporation (TMC) in Waltham, Massachusetts , in 1983, moving in 1984 to Cambridge, MA. At TMC, Hillis assembled a team to develop what would become the CM-1 Connection Machine, a design for a massively parallel hypercube -based arrangement of thousands of microprocessors , springing from his PhD thesis work at MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (1985). The dissertation won

86-1027: A Hertz Foundation Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , under the supervision of Marvin Minsky , Claude Shannon and Gerald Sussman , receiving his PhD in 1988. He later served as an adjunct professor at the MIT Media Lab , where he wrote The Pattern on the Stone . Hillis has founded a number of technology companies, including Thinking Machines Corporation , Applied Minds, Metaweb Technologies , Applied Proteomics, and Applied Invention. Hillis has over 300 issued patents in fields including parallel computers, touch interfaces, disk arrays , forgery prevention methods, electronic and mechanical devices, and bio-medical techniques, RAID disk arrays, multicore multiprocessors and for wormhole routing in parallel processing . As

129-603: A weather forecasting technology company with consumer web and mobile applications that was eventually sold to Apple. Hillis' 1998 popular science book The Pattern on the Stone attempts to explain concepts from computer science for laymen using simple language, metaphor and analogy. It moves from Boolean algebra through topics such as information theory , parallel computing , cryptography , algorithms , heuristics , Turing machines , and evolving technologies such as quantum computing and emergent systems . In 1986, Hillis expressed alarm that society had what he called

172-600: A "mental barrier" of looking at the year 2000 as the limit of the future. He proposed a project to build a mechanical clock that would last 10,000 years. This project became the initial project of The Long Now Foundation , which he co-founded with Stewart Brand and where he serves as co-chairman. A prototype of the Clock of the Long Now is on display at the London Science Museum . A full-scale mechanical clock

215-481: A 20-dimensional hypercube, which was later scaled down. Each CM-1 microprocessor has its own 4  kilobits of random-access memory (RAM), and the hypercube -based array of them was designed to perform the same operation on multiple data points simultaneously, i.e., to execute tasks in single instruction, multiple data ( SIMD ) fashion. The CM-1, depending on the configuration, has as many as 65,536 individual processors, each extremely simple, processing one bit at

258-686: A B.S. in Life Sciences from MIT in 1984, and a M.S. in computer graphics from the MIT Media Lab in 1987. After receiving his master's degree, Sims worked on special effects software at Whitney/Demos Productions and then was a co-founder of Optomystic . At Optomystic in 1989, Sims developed software for the Connection Machine 2 (CM-2) that animated the water from drawings of a deluge by Leonardo da Vinci , used in Mark Whitney 's film Excerpts from Leonardo's Deluge . Sims

301-431: A CM-2 to implement a game that he later turned into the novel Snow Crash . In 1996, Hillis joined The Walt Disney Company in the newly created role of Disney Fellow and as vice president, Research and Development at Disney Imagineering . He developed new technologies and business strategies for Disney's theme parks, television, motion pictures, and consumer products businesses. He also designed new theme park rides,

344-476: A differential equation involving the average number of 1 bits in an address. They resubmitted the design of the chip with only five buffers, and when they put the machine together, it worked fine. Each chip is connected to a switching device called a nexus. The CM-1 uses Feynman's algorithm for computing logarithms that he had developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory for the Manhattan Project . It

387-542: A full-sized walking dinosaur, and various micro mechanical devices. In 2000, Hillis co-founded the R&;D think-tank Applied Minds with his Disney colleague Bran Ferren . Minds is a team of engineers, scientists, and designers that provide design and technology services for clients. The creative environment and the diverse projects it undertook gained Applied Minds abundant media attention. "It's as if Willy Wonka's chocolate factory just yawned wide to welcome us. Only here, all

430-718: A graduate student at MIT, Hillis co-founded Thinking Machines Corporation to produce and market parallel computers , developing a series of influential products called the Connection Machine . At the time the company produced many of the fastest computers in the world. The Connection Machine was used in demanding computation and data-intensive applications. It was used by the Stanford Exploration Project for oil exploration and for pioneering data mining applications by American Express , as well as many scientific applications at organizations including Schlumberger , Harvard University , University of Tokyo ,

473-578: A human. He used this method to create the video Primordial Dance – which, according to one published study with supplementary video, calls to mind the history of early 20th century abstraction among its several evolutionary themes – as well as parts of Liquid Selves . Genetic Images was an interactive installation also based on this method; it was exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, 1993, as well as Ars Electronica and

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516-452: A massively parallel computer for Artificial Intelligence, consisting of a million processors, each similar to a modern Graphics Processing Unit. This work culminated in the design of a massively parallel computer with 64,000 processor cores . He named it the Connection Machine , and it became the topic of his PhD , for which he received the 1985 Association for Computing Machinery Doctoral Dissertation award. Hillis earned his doctorate as

559-763: A producer of computer software, including Logo, for elementary schools . As a graduate student at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory , Hillis designed tendon-controlled robot arms and a touch-sensitive robot "skin". During his college years, Hillis was part of the team that built a computer composed entirely of Tinkertoys , currently at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California . At MIT, Hillis began to study Artificial Intelligence under Marvin Minsky . In 1981, he proposed building

602-400: A sea snake or fish, jumping and tumbling (walking was not achieved). The creatures were also co-evolved in different species to compete for possession of a virtual cube, displaying the red queen effect . The cover of Chris Langton 's 1995 book Artificial Life: An Overview uses an image of the creatures generated by Sims. In 1997, Sims created the interactive installation Galápagos for

645-401: A team of scientists, designers, and engineers, including people in the field as well as those who later became leaders and innovators in multiple industries. The team included Sydney Brenner , Richard Feynman , Brewster Kahle , and Eric Lander . Among the users of Thinking Machines computers was Sergey Brin , who went on later to found Google , and Neal Stephenson , who attempted to use

688-409: A time. CM-1 and its successor CM-2 take the form of a cube 1.5 meters on a side, divided equally into eight smaller cubes. Each subcube contains 16 printed circuit boards and a main processor called a sequencer. Each circuit board contains 32 chips. Each chip contains a router , 16 processors, and 16 RAMs. The CM-1 as a whole has a 12-dimensional hypercube -based routing network (connecting

731-701: Is a member of the National Academy of Engineering , a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery , a fellow of the International Leadership Forum , and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Karl Sims Karl Sims (born 1962 ) is a computer graphics artist and researcher, who is best known for using particle systems and artificial life in computer animation. Sims received

774-408: Is being installed at a site inside a mountain in western Texas. Hillis is the recipient of the inaugural Dan David Prize for shaping and enriching society and public life in 2002, the 1991 Spirit of American Creativity Award for his inventions, the 1989 Grace Murray Hopper Award for his contributions to computer science, and the 1988 Ramanujan Award for his work in applied mathematics. Hillis

817-532: Is titled "The Connection Machine" in reference to the CM-1. Danny Hillis William Daniel Hillis (born September 25, 1956) is an American inventor , entrepreneur , and computer scientist , who pioneered parallel computers and their use in artificial intelligence . He founded Thinking Machines Corporation , a parallel supercomputer manufacturer, and subsequently was Vice President of Research and Disney Fellow at Walt Disney Imagineering . Hillis

860-564: Is well suited to the CM-1, using as it did, only shifting and adding, with a small table shared by all the processors. Feynman also discovered that the CM-1 would compute the Feynman diagrams for quantum chromodynamics (QCD) calculations faster than an expensive special-purpose machine developed at Caltech. To improve its commercial viability, TMC launched the CM-2 in 1987, adding Weitek 3132 floating-point numeric coprocessors and more RAM to

903-532: The CM-5 , announced in 1991, TMC switched from the CM-2's hypercubic architecture of simple processors to a new and different multiple instruction, multiple data ( MIMD ) architecture based on a fat tree network of reduced instruction set computing (RISC) SPARC processors. To make programming easier, it was made to simulate a SIMD design. The later CM-5E replaces the SPARC processors with faster SuperSPARCs. A CM-5

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946-736: The Los Alamos National Laboratory , NASA , Sandia National Laboratories , National Center for Supercomputer Applications , Army High Performance Computing Research Center, University of California Berkeley , University of Wisconsin at Madison , and Syracuse University . In addition to designing the company's major products, Hillis worked closely with users of his machine, applying it to problems in astrophysics , aircraft design , financial analysis , genetics , computer graphics , medical imaging , image understanding , neurobiology , materials science , cryptography , and subatomic physics. At Thinking Machines, he built

989-710: The Los Angeles Interactive Media Festival. Sims received an Emmy Award in 2019 for outstanding achievement in engineering development. In 1998, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship . He has won two Golden Nicas at Prix Ars Electronica , in 1991 and in 1992. He has also received honors from Imagina , the National Computer Graphics Association , the Berlin Video Festival , NICOGRAPH , Images du Futur , and other festivals. He

1032-626: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and received his bachelor of science in mathematics in 1978. As an undergraduate , he worked at the MIT Logo Laboratory under the tutelage of Seymour Papert , developing computer hardware and software for children. During this time, he also designed computer-oriented toys and games for the Milton Bradley Company . While still in college, he co-founded Terrapin Inc.,

1075-534: The NTT InterCommunication Center in Tokyo . In this installation, viewers help evolve 3D animated creatures by selecting which ones will be allowed to live and produce new, mutated offspring. His paper "Artificial Evolution for Computer Graphics" described the application of genetic algorithms to generate abstract 2D images from complex mathematical formulae, evolved under the guidance of

1118-647: The USC Viterbi School of Engineering . He was the first principal investigator of the National Cancer Institute's Physical Sciences in Oncology Laboratory at USC. In 2015, Hillis co-founded Applied Invention, an interdisciplinary group of engineers, scientists, and artists. Applied Invention develops technology solutions in partnership with other companies and entrepreneurs . Applied Invention co-founded Dark Sky,

1161-534: The control room for the island (instead of a Cray X-MP supercomputer as in the novel). Two banks, one bank of 4 Units and a single off to the right of the set could be seen in the control room. The computer mainframes in Fallout 3 were inspired heavily by the CM-5. Cyberpunk 2077 features numerous CM-1/CM-2 style units in various portions of the game. The b-side to Clock DVA 's 1989 single "The Hacker"

1204-493: The 2 chips), a main RAM, and an input-output processor (a channel controller) . Each router contains five buffers to store the data being transmitted when a clear channel is not available. The engineers had originally calculated that seven buffers per chip would be needed, but this made the chip slightly too large to build. Nobel Prize -winning physicist Richard Feynman had previously calculated that five buffers would be enough, using

1247-522: The ACM Distinguished Dissertation prize in 1985, and was presented as a monograph that overviewed the philosophy, architecture, and software for the first Connection Machine, including information on its data routing between central processing unit (CPU) nodes, its memory handling, and the programming language Lisp applied in the parallel machine. Very early concepts contemplated just over a million processors, each connected in

1290-558: The candy plugs in," said an article in Wired magazine . Work done at the firm covered the range of industries and application domains, including satellites, helicopters, and educational facilities. While at Applied Minds, Hillis designed and built a large-scale computer data center for Sun Microsystems (the Sun Modular Datacenter ) that would fit into a standard 20-foot shipping container , solving, among others,

1333-610: The company. Sims' animations Particle Dreams and Panspermia used the CM-2 to animate and render various complex phenomena via particle systems. Panspermia was also used as the video for Pantera 's 1994 cover of Black Sabbath 's " Planet Caravan ". Sims wrote landmark papers on virtual creatures and artificial evolution for computer art. His virtual creatures used an artificial neural network to process input from virtual sensors and act on virtual muscles between cuboid 'limbs'. The creatures were evolved to display multiple modes of water and land based movements such as swimming like

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1376-647: The first protein biomarker discovery platforms and a blood test for early stage colon cancer , but they were unable to convince investors to finance taking their proteomic technology to the market. Hillis has academic appointments as the Judge Widney Professor of Engineering and Medicine at the University of Southern California, Professor of Research Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC , and research professor of engineering at

1419-440: The machine's internal 12-dimensional hypercube network, with the red light-emitting diodes (LEDs), by default indicating the processor status, visible through the doors of each cube. By default, when a processor is executing an instruction, its LED is on. In a SIMD program, the goal is to have as many processors as possible working the program at the same time – indicated by having all LEDs being steady on. Those unfamiliar with

1462-458: The problems of accommodating processor capacity, cooling, power requirements, and storage within a uniquely portable solution. This type of "datacenter in a box," has now become a common method for building large data centers. For Herman Miller , Hillis designed an audio privacy solution based on phonetic jumbling—Babble —which was received in the media as a version of the Cone of Silence , and

1505-648: The software for the CM-1/2/200 single-bit processor was influenced by the Lisp programming language and a version of Common Lisp , *Lisp (spoken: Star-Lisp ), was implemented on the CM-1. Other early languages included Karl Sims ' IK and Cliff Lasser's URDU. Much system utility software for the CM-1/2 was written in *Lisp. Many applications for the CM-2, however, were written in C* , a data-parallel superset of ANSI C . With

1548-490: The system. Thirty-two of the original one-bit processors shared each numeric processor. The CM-2 can be configured with up to 512 MB of RAM, and a redundant array of independent disks ( RAID ) hard disk system, called a DataVault , of up to 25 GB. Two later variants of the CM-2 were also produced, the smaller CM-2a with either 4096 or 8192 single-bit processors, and the faster CM-200 . Due to its origins in AI research,

1591-461: The use of the LEDs wanted to see the LEDs blink – or even spell out messages to visitors. The result is that finished programs often have superfluous operations to blink the LEDs. The CM-5, in plan view, had a staircase-like shape, and also had large panels of red blinking LEDs. Prominent sculptor-architect Maya Lin contributed to the CM-5 design. A CM-5 was featured in the film Jurassic Park in

1634-610: Was acquired by Google , and its technology became the basis of the Google Knowledge Graph . In 2012, Hillis helped to create a research program on cancer and proteomics as Professor of Research Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC , and the principal investigator of the National Cancer Institute's Physical Sciences in Oncology Laboratory at USC. He co-founded Applied Proteomics (API) with David Agus to make proteomics -based biomarker discovery practical. Hillis and his colleagues at API developed one of

1677-558: Was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 for advances in parallel computers, parallel software, and parallel storage. More recently, Hillis co-founded Applied Minds, and Applied Invention, an interdisciplinary group of engineers, scientists, and artists. Born September 25, 1956, in Baltimore , Maryland , Danny Hillis spent much of his childhood living overseas, in Europe , Africa , and Asia . He attended

1720-411: Was later artist-in-residence from 1990 to 1996 at the supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence company Thinking Machines . In 1996, Sims founded and became CEO of GenArts , a Cambridge, Massachusetts company that developed special effects plugins used in film and video production. In 2008 he moved to a role on the board of directors when Insight Partners acquired a majority stake in

1763-405: Was marketed through a new company, Sonare. Also for Herman Miller, Hillis developed a flexible reconfigurable power and lighting system, which was marketed through another new company, Convia . As part of an early touchscreen map table interface, Hillis invented and patented the use of multiple touch points to control a zoom interface, which is now called "pinch to zoom.". One of these patents

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1806-592: Was the basis for the USPTO decision to reject Apple Inc. 's claim on a "pinch-to-zoom" patent in its legal dispute with Samsung , on the grounds that it was described in the Hillis patent. In 2005, Hillis and others from Applied Minds founded Metaweb Technologies to develop a semantic data storage infrastructure for the Internet , and Freebase , an open, structured database of the world's knowledge. That company

1849-470: Was the fastest computer in the world in 1993 according to the TOP500 list, running 1024 cores with Rpeak of 131.0 G FLOPS , and for several years many of the top 10 fastest computers were CM-5s. Connection Machines were noted for their striking visual design. The CM-1 and CM-2 design teams were led by Tamiko Thiel . The physical form of the CM-1, CM-2, and CM-200 chassis was a cube-of-cubes, referencing

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