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Cliff Shaw's Early AI Archive at the Smithsonian JUST Accessed (like two hours ago!)
Coincidentally (that is, having had no intentional scheduling coincidence with CCS), I (more precisely, my collaborator in DC) did our first exploration into the the Smithsonian archives of Cliff Shaw this morning. Shaw was the lead engineer on the world's first AIs: Shaw, Newell, and Simon's chess program, the Logic Theorist (which I've discussed in a separate thread), and GPS, the General Problem Solver -- the world's first general AI! These were all written in the 1950s and early 1960s, mostly by Shaw, mostly in IPL-V, a precursor of Lisp that was the world's first AI programming language (again, I've discussed this in the other thread).
I don't have permission yet to share everything we found publicly, but I'm pretty sure that no one's going to sue me for sharing a taste among colleagues:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12RW7YzunHcuAB4PvQPCOtVQdMCGvoqY8
Cheers,
'Jeff
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I got permission from the Smithsonian to publish the materials we obtained from the skim of Shaw's archives, as long as I keep the attribution:
"John Clifford Shaw papers, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution", so here's the whole skim. It's not a ton more than you've already seen in my previous post, but ... well, it's what we got on this first spelunking trip: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Ui_OIIytd0QRTOxVA8-5GKps86CDxbY2
There are some amazing bits of ephemera in Shaw's papers too - a song about NewShawSi, the Adrienne Rich poem about the GPS, and, in an echo of all the Epstein news at present, a whole lot of handwritten notes by Shaw trying to map connections between RAND, CS, and Watergate... talk about code context.