Danny Hillis
William Daniel " Danny" Hillis ( born September 25, 1956 in Baltimore, Maryland) is an American computer engineer and inventor, known for his development of parallel computers in the 1980s.
Life and work
Hillis is the son of epidemiologists U.S. Air Force, who in his study of hepatitis with his family in several African countries ( Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire, Kenya ) lived. During this time, Hillis was taught by his mother, a bio- statistician. Hillis studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where in 1978 his bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1981 and his master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science, made with a specialization in robotics. At MIT, he worked at the laboratory of the Logo programming language, where software and hardware has been developed for computers in primary schools and kindergartens. This work he continued the toy manufacturer Milton Bradley Company and the company he founded Terrapin Software. During this time he also built a working computer using the modular Toys Tinkertoys, which was later issued in the Computer Museum in Boston.
At the same time he worked on his doctoral thesis at MIT on parallel computers. In 1983, Hillis ' Thinking Machines Corporation "which developed a parallel computer, the " Connection Machine ", made up of many interconnected processor nodes. In the company at this time worked as a consultant Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, who was friends with Hillis and in the 1980s, the basic research on computer turned (including quantum computers ). In 1988 he was at MIT at Gerald Jay Sussman (as well as Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon) doctorate. In his company he pursued this research also eg for the application of parallel computers in Artificial Intelligence. He represents a similar philosophy as his teacher Marvin Minsky ( " Society of Minds" ) that the "secret" of human intelligence lies in massive parallelism, and that the transition from " artificial " to " human intelligence " is a question of quantity and no additional ingredients needed.
Since the development of special parallel computers, however, soon by the development of the PC market ( with the possibility of many PCs interconnect ) has been overhauled, the company filed for bankruptcy in 1994. Hillis founded a new consulting firm DHSH who advised, inter alia, the Walt Disney Company, and worked at the MIT Media Lab. It was founded in 1996 " Disney Fellow ," and Vice President of Research and Development at " Walt Disney Imagineering ", the research and development department of the Group. Among other things, he developed there ideas for the theme parks of Disney and also, for example, a wandering dinosaur robots in natural size.
2000 left Disney Hillis and Bran Ferren founded ( the head of Walt Disney Imagineering ), the company " Applied Minds", a technical consulting firm. One of their offshoot company was founded in 2005 to develop " Metaweb Technologies ", with the aim of techniques for semantic data storage on the Internet. Another was " freebase " which should develop an open, distributed database architecture.
In 1993, Hillis, given the knowledge of the ephemeral nature of storage technologies in the computer age, the project of a long-term storage of " human knowledge " before, how it is a mechanical clock high accuracy and reliability developed ("Clock of the Long Now "). The clock, the prototype of which was completed in 1999 should run at least 10,000 years, moving once a year a pointer and draw their energy from the climatic differences of the seasons. They should be housed in a mountain in Nevada. This led in 1996 to the founding of the " Long Now Foundation " by Hillis, Brian Eno, Stewart Brand, Esther Dyson and Mitch Kapor.
Hillis lives in Los Angeles. In 1989 he received the Grace Murray Hopper Award and the 2002 Dan David Prize.
Others
The clock project of Hillis also plays a prominent role in the experimental film " My Avatar and Me " (2010 /11) of the Danish filmmaker Bente Milton and Mikkel Stolt, who addressed the / virtual world of Second Life and in the Hillis multiple Himself occurs.
Writings
- Computer logic - so easy work computer. Bertelsmann, Munich 2001 ( English original The Patterns on the Stone. The Simple Ideas that make computers work 1999) ( popular science book about computers and computer science )
- The Connection Machine. MIT Press Series in Artificial Intelligence, 1985, ISBN 0-262-08157-1 (his dissertation)