Soon after his dismissal from Harvard, Fischer found a job at the consulting firmBolt Beranek and Newman (BNN). His main project, was on a computer-based information retrieval systems for a study directed by J.C.R Licklider (vice president of BBN) and inspired by Licklider's article on"Man-computer Symbiosis".
Yet in September 1962, Fischer started working on a computer program able to deduce answer to simple questions. Unfortunately, this system, highlighted by Licklider as "a signal advance in automated question answering", was still limited by the computer memory and calculation speed of that time.
In spring 1963, to be more efficient on this project, he took the grammar of English and in semantics class at MIT, where he was first introduced to the "Fairly easy" English method as recommended by Rudolf Flesch. That consists in the origin of Fischer's distinctive mature writing style. Fischer once said: "Make your style simple, not complicated", what he did by expressing himself in English rather than in mathematical language.
B for Tom - there are a lot of editing issues here.
ReplyDeleteI have some random thoughts about what is missed here.
First, interning at Rand - a think tank funded primarily by the Defense department - was a very big deal in the 1960s.
Note that his roommate thought he was disengaged from the people around him.
Note that he was playing a "video game" before they even had video to play the game on.
Extra credit to the first person on Monday who can produce a handwritten explanation of who Candide was and why that work was referenced in the text.