Wally Feurzeig
Wally Feurzeig | |
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Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) |
Wallace "Wally" Feurzeig (June 10, 1927 – January 4, 2013)[1] was an American computer scientist who was co-inventor, with Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon, of the programming language Logo,[3] and a well-known researcher in artificial intelligence (AI).
Early life and education
Wallace Feurzeig was born in
Career
During the early 1960s, Bolt, Beranek and Newman had become a major center of computer science research and innovative applications. In 1962, Wally Feurzeig joined the firm to work with its newly available facilities in the Artificial Intelligence Department, one of the earliest AI organizations. His colleagues were actively engaged in some of the pioneering AI work in computer pattern recognition, natural-language understanding, automated theorem proving, Lisp language development, and robot problem solving.
Much of this work was done in collaboration with distinguished researchers at the
Wally's initial focus was on expanding the intellectual abilities of extant teaching systems. This led to the first intelligent CAI system, MENTOR, which employed production rules to support problem-solving interactions in medical diagnosis and other decision-making domains. In 1965, Wally organized the BBN Educational Technology Department to further the development of computer methods to improve learning and teaching, and the focus of his work then shifted to investigating programming languages as educational environments. This shift was partly due to two recent technological advances: the invention of computer time-sharing and the development of the first high-level conversational programming language.
The idea of sharing a computer's cycles among autonomous users, working simultaneously, had stirred the imagination in Cambridge in 1963 and 1964. BBN and MIT teams raced to be first to realize this concept, with BBN winning by days and holding the first successful demonstration of computer time-sharing in 1964. BBN's initial system, designed by Sheldon Boilen, supported five simultaneous users on a DEC PDP-1, all sharing one cathode-ray tube (CRT) screen for output. Seeing dynamic displays from several distinct programs, simultaneously and asynchronously ("out of time and tune"), was a breathtaking experience.
Time sharing made feasible the economic use of remote distributed terminals and opened up the possibilities of interactive computer use in schools. BBN had recently implemented
Wally's collaborators in this research were
Further reading
References
- ^ a b c "Obituary: Wallace Feurzeig". Lexington Minuteman. Lexington, Massachusetts. January 29–31, 2013. Retrieved January 28, 2019.
- ^ "In Memory of Wally Feurzeig". DignityMemorial.com. Retrieved January 7, 2013.
- ISBN 978-0-684-87216-2. Retrieved August 11, 2010.