Alvy Ray Smith

Alvy Ray Smith interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 20th June 2017

0:05:11 Born in Mineral Wells, Texas, in 1943; my family history has turned out to be a complete surprise; as far as I knew we were Texans, New Mexicans, with a branch that had come in from Australia somewhere; now know longer genealogy going back ten or so generations, I know that some of my ancestors came over in the 1620-40 period as part of the settlement of New England, others came from France, Huguenots, forced out by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, there was an Irishman or two, and that is just my mother's side; I have not discovered very much about my father's side; they seem to have come in from the south and been in early Texas; my ancestry that I still really sense is Texas, all the way back to the Republic of Texas and the battle of San Jacinto where a small group of Texans fought off Santa Anna's giant army from Mexico, and won independence from Mexico; two of my ancestors were in that battle, that makes them heroes in Texas; I didn't know that until recently when I used DNA to take my genealogy back; one of my grandparents was born in Australia in New South Wales, his family having escaped from the satanic mills of Lancashire in 1840 and my other grandfather comes from this line of Texans, and he was a rancher; I knew the rancher but not the Australian; I did not know my grandparents on my mother's side; she was adopted when she was two; I knew my grandfather but not my grandmother who died when I was very young; this generation were all ranchers and farmers, they raised orchards, or cattle, or did some subsistence farming; my parents were both born in New Mexico; my father was born in a very small town in the mountains of New Mexico called Mayhill, raising cattle, horses, on a small scale, they had no money, very poor people; he was the first in the family to go to college; my mother grew up in a town called Tularosa, New Mexico, right on the edge of the vast desert where the first 'A' bomb was set off; she loved history and eventually taught it in junior high school in my home town of Clovis, New Mexico; I have been thinking a lot about my parents because they both died just two years ago at 93 and 94 having been good people all the time; I liked them; I have seen people disgruntled by their parents and I could never understand it because I had a great time; mother, in particular, influenced me in a way that only made sense years later by showing me art books and telling me about history; she wasn't skilled in either of those fields although she could teach New Mexico history, but her interest in them made me interested in them; Dad was a smart man, my hero, and I could never understand how he could be such a liberal person in this very conservative small town that we lived in; he did it somehow by just being friends with everybody and not ever talking politics; I know that I was a concern to them because they knew I was very bright and they were afraid that I would lose the faith, Southern Baptist being the faith, and sure enough I did; my mother in fact was the cause although I think she knew at the time; they had one bookshelf full of books in their home, which was very unusual in the small town I lived in; most of these were their college books, they had both gone to college, but there was one interesting book there called 'Oriental Philosophy'; I pulled it off the shelf one day and my mother said that maybe I shouldn't read it; I don't remember how old I was but I must have been a teenager, and she couldn't stop me, and I learnt about other religions whose stories were just as rich and good as the Christian versions; it started making me ask questions and by the end of the year I had started on the path to the complete loss of faith; I was thirteen when that happened because I remember saying to myself that this was a very important year as I was doubting all that they were telling me about religion; in the Southern Baptist version, immersion is a sign that you have been made a member of the church; it doesn't save you from Hell and all that, but it makes you a voting member and is a public announcement that you are a believer; that happened when I was eleven, then I invalidated it, though I think that it is assumed that once a Baptist, always a Baptist, so probably still am one
8:51:23 The memory that comes to me as the first was looking out of a fence at the desert in a town called Las Cruces, New Mexico, where my grandfather lived at the time on a little subsistence farm; there was the yard with mulberry trees in it, cows, sheep, things like that, but on the other side of the fence was the desert; it is not stark desert, just sand, but had mesquite bushes all over it and cacti and horny toads we called them, lizards, which were wide and flat; there was glass out there which had turned colour with the exposure to the very hot sun; that is what I believe is my earliest memory; how old was I? We left Las Cruces when I was two, so could I really remember? Perhaps it was a year later; I grew up in Clovis, so all my public school training was there, eight miles from the Texas Panhandle; some people have heard of Lubbock and Amarillo Texas; Clovis, New Mexico, forms an equilateral triangle with them with Clovis as just one point in New Mexico; as a child I was a mad collector of stamps, but I generalized the idea to not just postage stamps but also savings stamps; I collected cigar bands and displayed them in albums; my father was a botanist and he was in love with the outdoors which I became too; he had a secret desire to be a park ranger in one of the National Parks and because of the realities of World War II and a young family he had to take a mundane job; he tried to show me the wonder of the National Parks and forests and why one would want to spend one's time there, and I got it, and I wanted to as well; his speciality in college was botany and he had made an entire botanic collection of all the wild flowers in New Mexico, all of them; it was many years later when I asked him if that included marijuana, which it did; he even discovered a new species of mushroom that is named after him
13:40:14 My primary school, called James Bickley, was just an ordinary school; I remember all my teachers; I remember that Mrs Grinslade particularly influenced me; I liked her so much that I made sure that for the next year I got in her class; my parents used to tease me about all the shenanigans I pulled to get into her class; I saw that they were just assigning people in a random manner and when I got close to them and realized that I wasn't on her list I would get back in line again so that I managed to get her for two years; she taught literature, though it turned out that it was her husband who was the main influence on me at the time because he taught biology; one of his requirements was that we had to learn the alimentary canal from mouth to anus, every chemical involved, all the enzymes and everything; it was great, and what a way to learn about the human body; she challenged me to read; she discovered I was a voracious reader; she had a set of history books called the Landmark series, and I read every single one; the next school was the junior high school, called Marshall Junior High, for three years, then to high school; in junior high I met Miss Jenkins who taught algebra; one day she explained how to solve quadratic equations and then put on the board ax2 + bx + c=0, told us she wanted us to solve it, and walked out of the room, so I did; when she came back she asked who had solved it and I said I had; you could tell that she just didn't believe it, but I had solved it; that put me on the fast path to mathematics because she knew I was bright and she helped me; apart from mathematics I was a band member and played the clarinet, and was pretty good; we had contests and I ended up at the State level band; at some point I had to decide whether to follow music or maths and science, and chose the latter; I might have been a good clarinet player for New Mexico but not for the greater world, and I knew that; I was a terrible sportsman except I could run; I don't remember hobbies at this time as this was social time when one met girls and friends; my male friends and I would go camping, hundreds of miles away up into the mountains; those areas are called the wilderness, no motorised vehicles allowed, and just spend a week; I just loved those periods; at the time I was still fighting with religion; it took me quite a few years as it had been hammered into me twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday; the rule in my home was that if I lived in that house I must go to church; my main objection to religion was that I couldn't understand the logic; I got so bored in church that I started reading the Bible and I read it cover to cover twice, and realized that it was just full of contradictions and bore little resemblance to what the preachers told us; I just realized that it was fabulous and fictitious and I just suddenly lost it, and once it goes I don't think there is any way to get it back; I didn't lose my sense of awe or reverence for nature, which some might argue is religion; I don't think so as awe is something that all human beings are capable of, and I'm not sure where the awe-religion division is if there is one; I am atheist; I have had several experiences in my life I think of this, though a religious person would not agree of course; surprisingly some of these have to do with psychedelic drugs, LSD for example, mescaline, peyote; it is just a chemical you add to your body so you know it is no supernatural force and that it's going to wear off so there is no having to believe in something else, and yet the experience of the world becomes so astonishing, breathtaking, marvellous, highest point of my life in this case so I said what was the difference between this and religious experience, I can't imagine one; I may be wrong, but I can't
21:23:15 After school I went to New Mexico State University; we were poor but you could get into the State university if you were a graduate of the high schools; tuition was about $100, so basically free; I started to wean myself from home living 300 miles away at Las Cruces, which I knew well as I had lived there as a child; it was a marvellous time to have been there; most people don't know this school but the town is located at the foot of these mountains called the Organ Mountains because the early Spanish explorers thought they looked like organ pipes; the mountains turn beautiful red at every sunset, every day; just as King's Chapel has become part of my every day world here, the Organ Mountains were part of my every day world living in Las Cruces; just beyond those mountains is this special place on the planet called White Sands which is one of the magical spots, pure white sand, thirty miles by maybe fifty miles of 40-50ft pure white sand dunes; when you enter the white sands you know you are there when everything has turned white except the sky - the road, the earth, everything is white, no plants, just white sand except for this astonishingly blue sky; that's one of those spots that may be not much different from religion, I'm not sure; it is one of those places you go to spiritually refuel; there is also a missile range there so the military basically owns this vast desert and shoots missiles off all the time as it is their testing range; for example, Werner von Braun was brought there at the end of World War II with his V2 rockets so that the American scientist could learn what he knew; I was there then so I must have seen these V2s being shot up, so I grew up with rockets going up and arching across the sky; I heard he first A bomb go off; science and high-tech was in the air but it didn't occur to me until later that most people didn't grow up with it; while I was going to school at the College there the Lunar Excursion Module was being built; I learnt about computers there in the early sixties; scientists would come over from White Sands Missile Range and teach a course on this new thing called programming; I signed up for it and as many people have I fell in love with this awesome thing; I look back at it and it must have been a silly machine though I can't remember what it was; I do remember that I learnt the language ALGOL before I learnt FORTRAN; everybody was learning FORTRAN because IBM was the big monopoly at the time; this man came over and actually taught us BALGOL which ran on a Burroughs computer of some sort; I looked it up once in order to do a Moore's Law calculation, I had a laptop and knew exactly how powerful it was, how much RAM it had; I made my first graphics on that Burroughs computer I am describing, so I found out what it had to be, got it's specs and did the computation; it was 4K or 8K, just tiny; what I liked about computers is the exactitude; I like the fact that it is problem solving too; I like the feedback, you know when you have got it right pretty quickly, and don't have to wait months and years - you know, and you can fix it on the spot; it's probably some sense that I'm in charge of that, that being room-sized beasts at the time; we had no concept of Moore's Law at the time as it was not expressed until 1965 so we had no sense that they were going to get smaller and more powerful; we had no sense of the awesome revolution that was to happen; we were not using computers in our physics course because most of the professors knew nothing about them; there was one old professor in the Electrical Engineering Dept. who taught power engineering and he realized that his subject was not very popular so the way he raised interest in it was to introduce the computer - you solved problems using Fortran this time; it worked for me and I signed up for power engineering which I never would have signed up for, just so I could program; it was the only way in town to get more programming experience; another important thing that happened at this university for me was the open stack library; I would just prowl around through the stacks to see what I could find; one day I came upon this fabulous section that had the complete works of John Von Neumann and another book that had a paper by Marvin Minsky called 'Steps toward Artificial Intelligence'; I flipped out, you mean this computer might be intelligent, what a concept; there was one other book, Frazer's 'Golden Bough'; I started to work my way though the volumes of this fabulous book; reading through all the stories that showed that Jewish-Christian stories were shared with other peoples in a completely different context; it just added support to where I was already heading; people down there were so intent on you following the Protestant Christian way that nobody taught me about this stuff; the University was not Christian in any formal sense but everybody was Methodist or Baptist, or Catholic if you were of Hispanic descent, that was it; I did meet Minsky later and he was a friend all his life; he died recently, and I found myself writing, not an obituary but an honouring statement about him; Minsky had come in and out of my life for decades even though we never worked together; so it was important for me to write it down as it was important to me; he was a funny, friendly man, very smart, a sort of "genius"
31:45:00 [continued in another room due to noise outside]
Re Minsky's paper on artificial intelligence - I don't believe he coined the term but it was a very early use of the term; I was so fascinated by it that I went to Stanford University to learn about it for my graduate work; once I was there I started questioning AI and how fast it was going to happen; Marvin Minsky came for a visit; there were two centres that I knew of at the time and Marvin was at the other, M.I.T., and I was at Stanford with John McCarthy; when Marvin came, somehow we ended having a pizza together in the Stanford shopping centre, and I screwed up my courage and asked him how he logically got from what we knew today to intelligence; I couldn't get there and thought I must be missing some very important point; I said that he must know and understand as he had devoted his entire career to this subject; he looked me in the eyes and said something like perhaps you don't have to know in order to practice, basically saying that he didn't know either; it gave me what I needed not to pursue AI, if that was as far as he had got I could see why I had not understood the pathway; what actually closed the deal on AI at the time for me was that I had John McCarthy teaching me Lisp and Ed Feigenbaum teaching me memory models; Ed Feigenbaum in a lecture said something about artists that was not kind, something like we don't care about that kind of mind; I realised that he had just cut out the people that I was most interested in, and came to the conclusion fairly rapidly that AI, at least in the mythical form that it had at that time, wasn't going to happen in my lifetime; I guess that the mythical form at that time was understanding how the brain worked which we still haven't found, so I starting casting round for something else to do; however, I am kind of tickled to think that I was right there at the beginning of AI which amazes students; Minsky was a very nice gentleman; he spoke truth to me instead of just giving me a sales pitch, so I changed Ph.D. subject to computation theory; several things had happened so that I almost got kicked out of Stanford graduate program because of my long hair; this was the high hippy time in the San Francisco Bay area - I was there from 1965-69 - so walked right into the "Summer of Love" and fell in love with it; this was Vietnam War time and it was very important to stay in graduate school otherwise they sent you to Vietnam and you got killed; I was having doubts about AI and couldn't find a place to go there anyhow and I went to take the Ph.D. qualifying exam - the Quals they are called at Stanford; you have to pass those before you even start the programme; the way the qualifying exams worked at Stanford at the time each student had, I believe, ten minutes each with eight professors - perhaps the other way round - and that's one on one in the professor's office; I went into Professor Skilling's office, the oldest man on the Electrical Engineering faculty, and he took one look at me and said that my hair was "unfortunate" and gave me a zero and blackballed me out of the Ph.D. program on a subject that I knew really well because I had worked several years in an antenna laboratory in Las Cruces designing antennas for the rockets being shot at the White Sands Missile Range; I was not only designing antennas but also testing them on the range, and I was in love with electro-magnetic theory, one of the most beautiful theories I had run across; he didn't ask me a question, just gave me a zero; I was distraught, so I decided to go for an interview trip to Los Angeles, to a company called Computer Science Corporation, I believe (on Stanford, I was blackballed on the qualifying exams which doesn't mean I was out, but I had to spend another year doing it again with an uncertain outcome); at the company there was a programmer's job, I was so good I just aced the quiz which turned out to be the equivalent of programming a Turing machine, which I did all the time; but it astonished the people at this company as they thought the test was so difficult that if you passed it you could program anything; they had in fact told me I was really smart, so I went back to the campus; as luck would have it a young professor, Ed McCluskey from Princeton, approached me; Stanford was trying to get him to leave Princeton and join them; Ed McCluskey had longish hair - Beatles' length; he asked me if I knew who he was and of course I did; he said that if he decided to stay he would need a graduate student if I was interested; he also said that what they had done in rejecting me was completely unfair; all you need sometimes is for somebody to reach out and that's what turned me around and made me stay; he did not turn out to be my advisor though he was on my committee; I chose a man named Michael Arbib who had written a book called Brains, Machines, and Mathematics, three of my favourite subjects in one title, and I did a thesis on cellular automata theory; that brings me back to Marvin Minsky because one of the things I proved was that one dimensional cellular automata are computation universal, so I had to understand all the computation theory; guess who had written the book on computation theory - Marvin Minsky; 'Computation and Infinite Finite Machines' I think was the name of the book, a beautiful well-written book and I used it again and again, so of course when I went to visit M.I.T. I would stop in to see Marvin, now in a new guise as "Mr Computation" rather that "Mr AI"; I remember one time being there with Marvin in his wonderful home, full of books; your could hardly walk through the rooms for the stacks of books; you had to wade your way through and there was junk everywhere but meaningful to him and his wife, Gloria; I guess one of the ways I measure men is how good a wife they choose; he had this wonderful wife [I can’t figure out what I must have said here, but the transcription doesn’t make sense]; Marvin took me out with several of his graduate students to dinner somewhere; Danny Hillis was one I remember, who would build a super-computer later; we were all chatting when all of a sudden I realized Marvin was down at the end of the table all by himself just talking away; he wasn't talking to anybody he was just talking; I looked over to Danny wondering if we should do something and he just shrugged his shoulders and said it was just Marvin being a genius and he did it all the time; it didn't seem to hurt his ego that no one was listening to him; I don't know what that means but he had so many ideas spewing out of him that it didn't matter if only 10% of them took; the third encounter is still a time I can't explain; I had a couple of lung operations so now I only have one-third lung capacity; the first operation happened in Marin County [California] and the doctor explained it was caused by a bacterial colony inside my pleural sac that had choked off my lung; I wondered how the bacteria had got into the pleural sac as there was no opening; the doctors said they didn't know, they had never seen it before although they had read about it in books; it only seemed to happen with skid-row bums; I asked if it could happen in my other lung and they said there was not a chance; one month later I was on a ferry going to north Vancouver when the second lung got hit by the same thing; I went into a hospital there where nobody knew that I was there at all, and I got a call from Marvin and Gloria Minsky asking how I was doing; I have a theory how it happened but it's just like they had reached out to somebody in trouble, and it completely endeared both of them to me forever; the relationship continued by these conferences called EG Entertainment Gathering held every two years by a friend of mine, Michael Hawley, a kid who I had hired at Lucasville and who had lived in Minsky's house while he was a student; the gatherings were like TED conferences but were more about entertaining and music than general subjects; Marvin and Gloria were at every one of these; they always occurred in Monterey, California, and Michael [Hawley] always invited his old friends at M.I.T., so I'd meet him there and keep in touch; then suddenly Minsky died and I wrote an account of our friendship for his family; I never pursued AI any further after that; I followed it as it's one of my abiding interests, but I never practised it; computation theory I don't practise any more either
48:58:23 After my Ph.D. I got a job as a professor at New York University working in the department of a man named Herb Freeman; something I did not know at the time but just learnt last week when writing chapter 7 for my book that Herb Freeman was actually Herbert Friedmann, originally from Germany, he escaped the Nazis with the help of Albert Einstein; his family realized they had to flee but they couldn't get young Herbert out of the country because the Nazi doctor said he had TB; he didn't, but it took three letters from Albert Einstein to re-test him and let him into the U.S. in 1938; he became one of the earliest computer graphics people in the world, and my chairman; at that time I taught an AI course in his department, I taught computation theory, the things I knew; I was pursuing cellular automata at this time; there was a thing called a 'Game of Life' which was really hot during this period which was the cellular automaton; the 'Game of Life' was made famous by Scientific American magazine; Martin Gardner had a column in it that I read all the time when I was growing up called 'Mathematical Games' I think; Scientific American was in my little town's library and I could open it up and learn about things; you learn science in school but here I learned about topology, for example, and Martin Gardner always had these amazing pieces on mathematical lore; I got this issue when I was living in New York City; opened it at the mathematical games section and it's about the 'Game of Life' which is if you think of the world as an infinite chess board and each cell is occupied or not, and the state of each cell changes depending on what its neighbours look like, and all kinds of elaborate patterns evolve out of this set of rules; I looked at it and thought this is a single cellular automata, I had just written my thesis on the general theory of CA as we called them, I bet Martin Gardner doesn't know a thing about this general theory, I bet he doesn't know that John Von Neumann invented it; I decided to call up my childhood hero, Martin Gardner, and tell him this, knowing that he just lived up the Hudson River from New York City; he quickly took my call and said he had never heard of this subject, could he come down and spend the day with me as this was really important as this had turned out to be the most popular subject they had ever had in the Scientific American magazine; he came to NYU campus, a little wiry man, and he started apologising almost immediately for not being a real mathematician; he claimed he was just a philosopher, but I watched him; he spent all day with me and he wasn't taking any notes; at one point we went through the proof of a theorem, not a difficult theorem but still it had steps in it; no notes; this is important as the next day he sent me the next column, the 'Game of Life' having proved so popular they had decided to run it as the cover story, and he had sent it to me to vet it and check the logic; he had remembered everything, I didn't have to change a thing; he was surprised by how hirsute all the males were on the campus and I wondered how anybody could be surprised by that, especially the guy who edited the Annotated Alice which was de-rigour reading by any acid-dropping hippy in the world; it suddenly hit me that he had no idea why his book was so popular; there was such a large cultural divide there that I didn't feel free to jump across it; Martin was famous for several things - 'Alice in Wonderland', mathematical tricks, debunking charlatans, and magic; he said that the next thing that I needed to do was to design a cover for this issue of the magazine, he would submit some designs and I should too and the publisher would choose one; as a half-artist I love making book jacket designs and do it all the time; I had just returned from a cellular automata conference where I had proved this theorem which says that a one dimensional cellular automaton can recognise a palindrome in time equal to the length of the string - a real easy theorem, easy enough that I could illustrate it with colour coding; so I divided a page up into squares, and it was a space-time diagram so that the first line would be the state of the cellular automaton at time zero, time one, time two, time three etc., I colour coded it in a palindrome 'Too hot to hoot', which I got from a New York crossword puzzle, the clue was why don't owls live in the tropics; I colour coded that and then I showed how the proof worked by sending signals down a page; I couldn't think of another picture to draw so sent it in and it won so was the February 1971 cover for Scientific American, much to the chagrin of Martin Gardner; he had submitted designs by Stanislaw Ulam who with Von Neumann had come up with the idea of cellular automata theory which they never finished because Von Neumann died; Ulam's beautiful little diagrams weren't selected because it turned out that the publisher of Scientific American was a palindrome freak
58:04:12 In a sense this was the beginning of my computer graphics although I didn't use a computer to make it; Herb Freeman was already in computer graphics and he knew that I was an artist which was one of the reasons that he hired me; he wanted me to come and work in computer graphics theory with him; I remember saying to him that if he ever got colour then I would be there because it was still all black and white at the time, but I read all the theses of his early students so I was starting to come up to speed in the terminology and met some of the early players, one of whom was Robert Forrest who is in Norwich [UK] now; I have visited him three time on this sojourn in Cambridge; he has been one of my chief vetters as he knows all the players and who did what, so I've been milking his brain about why this happened here and why isn't this person included in the usual story etc. - a goldmine for me; I met him there [NYU] and a couple of early computer animators; then I broke my leg skiing in New Hampshire; it was a serious break of the femur which necessitated disabling the joint above and below the broken bone which meant that the hip had to be put in place and not moved; basically I was as stiff as a board for three months in a cast which went from my ankle to my nipples; I found out who my friends were because you have to be completely taken care of; I was astonished to find how many there were in New York, but the long and short of it was that I had three months to do nothing else but think 1:01:38:08 My friends rescued me from this little town in New Hampshire where the leg had been broken; a bunch of Jewish friends rented a special car because I couldn't bend so the station wagon had to have enough room on the diagonal for me to be put in there, just because they realized that I'd be lonely in this little town with no friends; if they bought my back to my home in New York City then at least I'd have friends nearby; beautiful treatment; they brought me into the house and I saw this kid Roy Conowitz putting up a Christmas Tree; it was pretty obvious he had never done so before but I was touched that he thought enough to put it up for me just to make me feel good; so for three months I lay there and thought and thought and thought; then as people do you rethink your life, what I was doing right and what wrong; then I decided that what I was doing wrong was that I was doing nothing about my art, I had just stopped it; what I forgot to say earlier was that I painted all my life, oil paints and then acrylics; my Uncle George in Las Cruces New Mexico was an artist and art teacher and he showed me how it was done; as long as I didn't say anything I could sit on the floor in his studio while he worked, I was the only member of the family that he would allow; I would watch and learn how to prepare a canvas, stretch it and lay it out, prepare the brushes, mix the paints, clean them in the turpentine and all that stuff, and I was surrounded by his art books; so my art education was watching Uncle George; as soon as I could I started getting canvases and oil paints and painting pictures; I even had an art show at the Stanford Student Union where of course I didn't sell anything but one of my paintings was stolen so I took that as a big mark of success; then when I became a professor I just dropped all making of art; I realized that that was wrong as it was part of me; another thing was that I was feeding the Vietnam war with computer jocks, that wasn't right either; I decided that when I came out of the cast I should drop academia and go to California where something good would happen; by that time I was thirty with no family so I could actually consider doing this; the logic was no more than a whim, just an intuitive guess, total impetuosity, but I operated on it which amazes me now looking back; I came out of the cast, went to NYU and announced that I was dropping out and going to California; the reactions I got were mostly "I wish I could do that"; one by one each professor took me aside and said it, so I was being supported in this crazy decision by everybody who apparently had everything; that encouraged me and I went to California; I had saved money during my years as a professor and had enough just to get by as a hippy, crashing on other people's floors; one of the people I crashed with was a professor of computer science at Berkeley; he asked if I would like to teach a class so I taught on cellular automata theory but I was really looking for the magic that was supposed to happen to me when I got to California; what it turned out to be was that my best friend in the world at the time, Dick Shoup, whom I met in the East and had moved to California ahead of me, was working at Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre which is now fabled but nobody had heard of it at the time; he encouraged me to go over and see what he was doing as he had built a machine for artists; I didn't really know what he was saying but I went because he was a friend, and he had built a paint program on a computer; of course as soon as I saw it I thought this is it; it was 1974 long before Microsoft's Paint program; Dick had written a paint program for 8 bit pixels; Xerox had the first colour pixels in the world at 8 bits each and 256 colours; I thought how do I get on Xerox PARC, they had no slots for hires but I had enthusiastic supporters, one of whom was Alan Kay, Dick and several others; they decided they could hire me with a purchase order to make art on Dick's SuperPaint, as it was called, and show it to the world as a new kind of art device; this was perfect as I didn't need much to live on and didn't care whether I was officially hired or not as long as I had access to the machine; that's what happened, and for the next year I just made art as fast as I could as until then nobody had seen coloured pictures made out of pixels; every day was a new adventure and would experiment and record it on video recorders which were only thumb accurate so the tape starts and gets up to speed, records, stop then winds down so that editing was torture; I made a piece called Vidbits which turned out to be one of the earliest pieces of video art; I befriended an artist in San Francisco, David DiFrancesco, who begged to come and share the machine with me as a lot of artists did, but he begged in a better way; he made it clear that he loved machinery as much as art; he wasn't technologically brilliant but learned details of technology to a masterful level; finally I relented and suggested he come down one evening and we would jam all night; what that meant was I would work on the machine for a while, painting, then I would stop and he would take over; it usually was junk but sometimes it worked; we spent the time laughing and joking and became deep friends and still are; David needed money so suggested we do an N.E.A. [National Endowment for the Arts] grant exploiting this new art form; I had received National Science Foundation grants as a professor and they were torture putting in the grant proposal; David said for the N.E.A. the proposal was just one page long you send your work; so we submitted and it was in consideration by the N.E.A. when I got fired from Xerox, my purchase order got cancelled; I went in to see the boss to try to understand why I got fired and he said they had decided not to do colour; I looked at him and said he must know that the future was colour and that they owned it completely; he said that may be true but it was a corporate decision to go black and white; I should point out that in the lab there was Dick's machine where I was working all night long with David and having the wildest time, and in the corner was a little black and white machine with this guy William Newman working at it, Max Newman's son, but I didn't know that at the time; William Newman at the time had written the first text book on computer graphics, he and Bob Sproull, and the reason he was there was because he was famous for having written the book; I remember my boss coming up to me one day and saying "don't you find Dick's SuperPaint program difficult to use, isn't what William is doing in the corner much easier"? I just wanted to scream inside; then I became distressed for my friend Dick as his boss didn't know what he had and how good it was; anyhow, I left there with David and an N.E.A. proposal in the works but we had just lost the one machine we could execute it on, so we had to find the next such machine in the world; the word we use is frame-buffer, which is a piece of memory which you can see, and this was back when memory was incredibly expensive and basically we needed a quarter megabyte of memory with video attached to it, $100,000-200,000 price; we heard about this place called University of Utah because Alan Kay had come from there; we heard the next frame buffer was being built in Salt Lake City; David and I drove to Salt Lake City, found our way into the graphics department somehow, me with hair long and David's wild hair, so clearly not military contractors, but they said they couldn't support us or art as it was military funded; however they told us that a crazy rich man had come and bought one of everything in sight; first question, did he buy the frame buffer? Yes; now this product hadn't been built yet but it was in the works; so we decided to visit the man, Alexander Schure, who had come from Long Island, New York; they told us of a former student from Utah who had just graduated who wanted to make animated movies with computers; his name was Ed Catmull and he'd given up on it happening in Utah and had taken a job in computer aided design in Boston but had got a call from Alexander Schure to come and join him which he did, so he is now in charge of all the equipment; we were told of a professor at Utah, Martin Newell, who was famous for one of the first three-dimensional models of a teapot; he was going to visit Ed Catmull on Long Island to find out what was going on; he promised to call me once he got back to tell me what he had seen; when he called he said that we should get on the next plane; we got there and met one of the craziest people in my life, Alexander Schure; it is hard to explain his uniqueness but when we talk I say something and you say something in response; not with Uncle Alex as we called him; Alex would come into the room at any time and would be talking when he entered - just a stream of consciousness; so what do you do when someone is just talking at you with no give and take? I just started talking too and after a while I noticed that some of the things I'd said showed up in his stream of words; so that's how it worked, and believe it or not it did work for several years; this man thought of himself as the next Walt Disney; he had a complete cel animated movie studio at the New York Institute of Technology, but it was a diploma mill, not a well respected academic institute; I had taught in New York City for four years and had never heard of this place; it was a private university belonging to Uncle Alex, designed for students who couldn't get into real colleges, living with Mum and Dad on Long Island, commuting into college and getting some sort of diploma; the book store on the campus said it all as in it's display window it had tyres and batteries; that school has gone on to be a pretty good one, world wide in its locations, so I think it is a very different place now; then it was a diploma mill run by this wealthy man; he had somehow cobbled together four adjoining estates on the north shore of Long Island which is where the really wealthy people live, and he used the mansions on those estates as the building of his campus; where did the money come from? we never knew; we weren't allowed to ever see the budgets; we just spent and he did it just on our say-so; it was like a wonderful movie where you'd go to one mansion to do the video then to another to do the graphics, then to see my girlfriend on another estate; for example, David, my artist friend, and I shared a house which was the chauffeur's quarters above this four or five car garage on the estate that belonged to David Rockefeller's wife; it was clear that we were the tenants and they were the family; they had a special "honk" when talking; apparently you can tell which prep school they came from by the tone of their "honk" - Tom Wolfe wrote a whole book about it; they were very good to us as they let us live there for years; on our first visit to take a look, David and I had spent our last money on the plane; arrived in a snow storm, walked in the door of the computer lab and there was Ed Catmull and another long-haired guy; Ed became my partner for sixteen years and we founded Pixar together, a good Mormon boy, grew up in Salt Lake City, a missionary on Coney Island, strict believer until he wasn't later in life; I wanted to show crazy Alex my video tape; it was U-matic format and he said he had a player in every room in his house - he lived in yet another mansion; so we went to his house; he warned us of guard dogs who would eat us if they saw us, so moved them out of the room with the video player; I put in the tape and it didn't play; he said there was a player in the next room so remove the guard dogs from there and tried again; we did it six times before we found a U-matic that worked without being spotted by the guard dogs; he loved it, I knew I was in, I didn't have a job but I wanted access to the machine; I got it; David had to hang out for a year waiting for the N.E.A. grant and it finally came; the great adventure really began there; there were about ten of us eventually and we were making discoveries so fast and furiously that nobody wanted to go to sleep as you would miss something if you did; it was so exciting and it was in this beautiful estate lands on the north shore of Long Island, the Great Gatsby area and all that; everything we touched nobody had ever seen before; he bought the next 8 bit frame buffer and then he came in one day and basically through that long process managed to ask how do we stay ahead. we were the leading computer graphics lab in the world; I said that if he bought me two more of these 8 bit things I could make a 24 bit frame buffer and then we'd have 16,000,000 colours instead of just 200 and we can do anything then; he just walked away; sure enough, a few weeks later he came in and said he had bought five more so we could have two of the RGB things; these were the first full colour pixels in the world and we had more of it than anybody else in the world, so 24 bit frame buffers was the term; so everything we touched was new and original and worthy of a paper; again going at ninety miles an hour, what shall we think next, develop next and so on; meanwhile we were working with these cel animators, 100 person plus group of persons making a movie called 'Tubby the Tuba'; Alex had a mad idea that somehow we could replace all the people and make the movie on the computer; we said no it doesn't work like that and don't say that; these guys were scared to death of us for that very reason, they don't know that computers can't make art, we can help them but we can't replace them; we finally figured out that this guy was too crazy and incompetent to make a good movie and we kind of kept our distance from that movie project, but we learnt how animated movies were made, the whole difficult logistics of it all which is really the secret; we said to ourselves that we should be the first people in the world to make a computer movie; we could see it though we did not know how we were going to get there; that is when we had the vision that took us twenty years to execute as 'Toy Story' at Pixar; we went through three rich men in the process, one was this Alexander Schure, another was George Lucas and the third was Steve Jobs; I'm not sure we would have stuck to it if we'd known it was going to take twenty years; I just want to say how wonderful and rich these years were, surrounded by geniuses, everybody was just so good; these people would find their way to us as they knew what we were doing and wanted to take part, and then show what they could do; people are always asking how do you create a team and I don't think I could tell you, you hire them, being able to spot them is the trick; but to me it's fairly easy, they've got a glint in their eyes, they can talk your talk, and they are just ready and you can feel it; we surrounded ourselves with people like that and didn't really have to do any bossing; it's like an academic department where people just do what they do, they see what needs to be done and do it; that probably would have worked forever if the guy in charge had been a competent movie maker, but he wasn't; 'Tubby the Tuba' came out and it was so horrible; we were at the MGM screening studio in Manhattan and I think that most of us in the front row went to sleep to avoid this train wreck that was happening on the screen; anything you could do wrong was wrong. there was lint on the frames, shadows under the opaque lines, and the story was no good, and this guy Alexander Schure had his name six times in the credits; the only young animator came up to us after and said he had just wasted two years of his life; so we realized that even though we were living in this paradise it wasn't going to work; about then we got two phone calls; one came from Francis Ford Coppola and the other from George Lucas; the person representing Coppola was somebody I did not trust so I didn't even make a positive noise, and sure enough that group coked out a few years later; then the Lucas group called; now Francis Ford Coppala is a far greater director than George Lucas but he's also shaky financially; George Lucas might not be such a great director but he's stable on the money side and we knew that we needed that second kind of financial backing as ours was a long-term, very expensive project; we had only just heard of George Lucas because of 'Star Wars'; I remember everybody jumping into my car and going to Manhattan to see 'Star Wars' and thinking wow! that's different; we always thought it would be Walt Disney who came to rescue us; Ed and I would go out to Disney Studios - Walt was already dead - basically on our hands and knees offering to take them to the next stage as we knew how to do it; all the technical people knew exactly who we were and that it was a great idea, but the leaders of the company were basically incompetent; for example, the president of Disney at this time was a professional football player who was "qualified" to be president by being married to Walt Disney's daughter; he was just running the company into the ground; neither he nor his vice-presidents could figure out what Ed and I were talking about at all, and they would just laugh us away; we had taken numbers of secret trips and we did meet all their early animators like Frank Thomas and Olly Johnson, met all the technical level guys, all these relationships which eventually panned out but we didn't know that of course; we were just trying to get into Disney; they had the money, the artistic skill, why aren't they the ones paying for this rather than the crazy man on Long Island; but it was George Lucas who came knocking; Ed and I very carefully crafted a letter saying that we were used to a very high standard of living, that we wanted to come and work with you but we don't want to go downhill; we asked that he send somebody secretly to see what we were used to; one day the head of special effects of Lucas films showed up with a giant Star Wars belt buckle for the visit; we thought oh no, but nobody quite put it together what that belt buckle meant; we had a great interview; I spent the evening with this director in Manhattan; he had never been to Manhattan before, so we played around there until 4am just doing all kinds of things which he had heard about but never seen before; by the next morning I knew we were in though it took a little while to put it all together, we pulled it off
1:39:16:12 We got to Lucas Films; we thought that we had made it clear that we wanted to make content in the movies not just hardware and software; we were willing to pay our way by building hardware and software but we wanted to be in the movies; it wasn't clear to him; there was only one creator there and that was George Lucas; mistakenly I had thought we were there to be in his movies so I started hiring the best computer graphics experts I could find; they were willing to come to be in the movies; I had a world-class team and George never showed up; finally I realized he just didn't get it, he doesn't understand who he has here; about that time Paramount Pictures came to Lucas Film to have their special effects executed and they wanted to put computer graphics in 'Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan'; so this is not one of George's movies but Paramount's; the producers brought me over and showed me what they had in mind and I asked them if they were aware what we could do with computers; they did not; I said I knew what their story needs were and would think about it overnight; they agreed; I told them we could not do movie resolution yet, only video resolution, as it was still early days; they said that was fine as they were showing a video demonstration to Captain [my mistake, it should be Admiral] Kirk; sleepless night later I show up with a very crude story board which I still have, but landed the job; I brought my team together and told them we had just got the big break, first time on the big screen in what would undoubtedly be a successful motion picture, but this really is a 60 second commercial to George Lucas; I knew this one thing about George that guided me in what I did next; I knew that when he watches a movie he never loses track of the cameraman; he knows exactly where the camera is and what it is doing; now if a director is any good at all you can't do that because he's sucked you into the emotion of the film, but George could look somehow right through the emotion and watch the camera; knowing that I said to my team that we were going to put in a camera move which would blow George's socks right off him; it will make narrative sense to the audience but he'll know that no real camera can move that way, it will basically have six dimensions of freedom; that is what we did; it took us about six months to do this one 60 second piece because that's how slow things were then; day after the premier George steps one foot into my office, he's a shy man, and says "great camera move", and then left; it had worked so he had us in his next movie, briefly, and more importantly he told his best friend Steven Spielberg about us and we were in Steven's next movie, then the word started to spread; but we were still not doing character animation which was our goal, that was special effects animation; Ed and I in 1983 on the plane back from SIGGRAPH, the annual conference that we go to, decided that at the next SIGGRAPH in 1984 we would announce to the world that we did character animation; I started drawing storyboards right on the plane; I still have the original sheets with the date on and everything; it was still a crummy storyboard but it when it started; I started executing that piece and I was saved by another one of those amazing pieces of luck hiring John Lasseter, this young animator, the best animator I still have ever run across; he had been at Walt Disney but he'd been fired, which we didn't know, but he was available and wanted to come and work with us; we snapped him right up and he basically saved my movie; I thought I could animate it but now I look back and I see I didn't have a chance; I don't have the magic that an animator has; that was the first piece with John Lasseter who was basically the secret weapon, and that group of people became Pixar; George and Marcia got divorced shortly after this and in California that means that half the fortune goes to either spouse without question; I went to Ed and said that George never quite got who we are and he couldn't afford us any more and will fire us; I said it would be a sin to let this world-class group of creative graphicists disperse; let's start a company to make a home for them; that's two computer nerds talking to each other who didn't have a stick of business sense; he said OK and we went across the street and bought four How to start a Company books; we did it, the hard part being what's the company going to do because by that time Moore's Law needed to go through another order of magnitude; the reason I knew that was because a Japanese company had come to us to do a film and that project failed because I computed what the cost would be, and we weren't in the ball park yet; it needed another Moore's Law cycle; what are we going to do for five years? build hardware; we had a prototype we'd built for George, we would turn that into a product and sell that, then Moore's Law will get there and something will happen; we went through forty-five funders who, all said no - thirty-five venture capital firms, fifteen [my mistake, it should be ten] large corporations; General Motors almost closed the deal with us but it fell through; Ed and I were frantic; on the way back from the General Motors negotiation we decided to call up Steve Jobs; he had come through earlier in this financing game; he had asked Ed and me to come down to his mansion in Woodside, California; I remember sitting out on the grass there, and Steve who had recently been kicked out of Apple said he wanted to buy us from George Lucas and run us; we said no, we want to run our own company but we'll take your money; he agreed but the figure was so low, about a third of what General Motors was offering as at the time and it looked as though the General Motors deal was done; the story is that we came back from the failed negotiations, asked Jobs to make the same offer again, he did and it worked this time; that's how Steve Jobs became out venture capitalist; the myth that he spread was that he bought us but he did not, but funded us in the good old standard Silicon Valley way; he was the majority shareholder with Series A Preferred stock and the employees owned the rest of the stock, all the employees I should add, we were very egalitarian; for five years we were a miserable hardware production company; Steve Jobs was a hardware guy, that's why he was interested; we should have failed, indeed we did fail three or four times during that five years because what's failure; it’s when you can't pay the bills any more; we would have been dead in any other circumstance other than having Steve Jobs as our investor; Steve having been kicked out of Apple couldn't withstand the embarrassment of his second thing being a failure, so he would write us a cheque and take away more equity, until eventually after five years he did own the company and none of us had anything in it, but we were still alive; that's when Disney knocked on the door and said let's make that movie, and it was 'Toy Story'
1:50:32:24 Alison Gopnik and I are a second marriage for both of us; our joke is that we had to have a trial marriage in order to do it right; she is the companion of my life; we can talk about everything; I think it's about co-intellectuality as we are both on the same level; half the time I am her entourage and half the time she is mine and we get treated very well everywhere we go; she is an expert on how children's brains work and how they develop from zero to five years, probably a subject that more people should know about; one of the things that has happened here in Cambridge is that all the deep learning, machine learning, organizations in England have been talking to her; basically children are way ahead of the machines at this point, but it's right that these two groups should be talking to each other; on AI, here's what I believe; I believe that I'm a machine; there are no secret forces; we now understand the structure of the universe, what different pieces of matter are in the different forces at work; I believe that you are a machine, each of us is a machine, and therefore there is an answer about how it works; I have been searching all my life for the answer and I don't feel very much closer now than I did fifty years ago when I first started asking the question seriously; maybe when we get there we won't be able to understand it; I guess I don't believe that; look, I'm operating in the world right now and you are too; there is nothing magical in my belief system so there must be an explanation for it all; why it is so hard to get at is still puzzling me; I don't find that inconsistent with the sense of awe; if this machine has awe we have a machine that is full of awe; there seems to be a consequence somehow or another, and evil and all those things; the greatest inspiration of all is the children; they come along quite regularly, and within a couple of years they have figured us out; with their senses they have figured out what's going on in grandpa's brain; how? That's awesome; well they are little finite enclosures and they've got machines that we think we understand except their brain which is still so complex we barely know it yet, although we are getting closer and closer all the time; I see each one of those little creatures as another example that somebody knows how it works [??? I’m not sure what I was trying to say there], it's built into the genes and that's a machine, but it is a mystery to me why it has been so hard; could it be that as we increase the resolution of our measuring devices we will learn a lot more, like the Hubble telescope has taught us amazing things about the universe that we didn't know before just because we could see better; we are now down to seeing individual synapses in the brain, I don't know how many of them we can see at a time, probably not very many, but sooner or later we'll actually be able to measure with higher resolutions what parts of the brain are doing, and thereby it will emerge; I don't buy emergence, it's too much like the Second Coming, and you can't use that as an explanation