Danny Hillis: New concepts in computer logic

Clock of the Long Now Prototype, Science Museum, London. Photo: Phillip Kirlin

Some call the ‘Babble’, a device offering audio privacy, ‘the Cone of Silence’ for its resemblance to the device used by secret agent Maxwell Smart in the 1965 TV comedy series ‘Get Smart’. And in Texas, the project ‘Clock of the Long Now’, a mechanical clock designed to tick once a year, advance once every century, and have a cuckoo come out every millennium, is under construction — the project is planned to last for 10,000 years.

These projects come from the mind of William Daniel Hillis (born in 1956 in Baltimore, Maryland) computer designer, inventor, entrepreneur, and one of the leaders of parallel computing and its use in artificial intelligence.
Hillis received his bachelor of science in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1978 and studied Artificial Intelligence under Marvin Minsky. For his Ph.D., he designed a parallel computer with 64.000 processors which he named the Connection Machine, while later he served as a professor at the MIT Media Lab.
He founded many technology companies, including Thinking Machines Corporation, Applied Minds…