| Film |
what |
URL
to Internet Archive details page |
who |
when |
media |
runtime |
| 1. |
Robot hand stacks toy cubes. |
http://www.archive.org/details/sailfilm_hands |
Robert Bolles |
1972 |
silent, color |
3 mins |
| 2. |
Robot arm assembles water pump. |
http://www.archive.org/details/sailfilm_pump |
Richard Paul, et al. |
1973 |
silent, color |
7 mins |
| 3. |
Russian computer graphics of
animated ant. |
http://www.archive.org/details/sailfilm_ant |
Okhotsimsky |
1972 |
silent, b+w |
10 mins |
| 4. |
Simulation of orbital cable to
planet surface. |
http://www.archive.org/details/sailfilm_skyhook |
Hans Moravec |
1977 |
silent, b+w |
3 mins |
| 5. |
"Hear Here" is about speech
recognition. |
http://www.archive.org/details/sailfilm_hear |
Raj Reddy, et al. |
1969 |
sound, color |
15 mins |
| 6. |
Cart at Mech. Eng. Dept. prior
to Stanford AI Lab. |
http://www.archive.org/details/sailfilm_cart |
Stanford M.E. Dept. |
1966 |
silent, b+w |
10 mins |
| 7. |
Robot arms assemble bearings and
a hinge. |
http://www.archive.org/details/sailfilm_assembly |
Hand Eye Project |
1973 |
sound, color |
8 mins |
Links to moving images related to SAIL, squeezed in here at the request of Les Earnest, since a full rebuilding and modernization of this web site continues to elude me. BgBaumgart 2016-3-1.
I received this file via email in 2016, the clip is digitized Super8 film in color, but with no sound. People appearing include Russ Taylor, Norm Briggs, John McCarthy, Les Earnest, Dave Smith, Dave Poole, Irwin Sobel with supporting background provided by the D.C.Power Lab building and the 1600 Arastradero Road landscape; foreground includes the JMC Volley Ball court, net and the volley ball named Bounce Bounce. Super8 film is an 8mm wide ribbon of celluloid images. There were no hand held digital video cameras in 1972. I imagine that the Cart Camera might have been carried by one person, but its transmitter and two car batteries would not be very confortable on your back, and its remote digitizer required a full shelf of the kludge bay, the whole PDP-6 and most of the PDP-10 as well as many cabinets of core memory and the IBM-2314 pizza oven with its disk packs.
Published on Sep 4, 2013, a short documentary on about a 1968 Stanford University project which involves the use of Speech, Vision and Robotics. A longer version, with run time of 10:54 has been on the Internet Archive since 2006 and is a slightly truncated copy of the full version runtime 12:36 of the original WMV file download LINK here which should get reformated and moved to You Tube; as well as fixed on the Internet Archive. Description: Published 1969 (This copy ends abruptly, Ray Reddy recently said he can provide the missing part, 2006). Topics Speech Recognition, Robotics, SAIL, Raj Reddy, SAILFILM, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Rancho Arm
This film describes the state of the speech recognition project as of Spring, 1969. A discussion of the problems of speech recignition is followed by two realtime demonstrations of the system. The first shows the computer learning to recognize phrases and the second shows how the hand-eye system may be controlled by voice commands. Commands as complicated as 'Pick up the small block in the lower lefthand corner', are recognized and the tasks are carried out by the computer controlled arm.
The first six minutes depict the hardships of doing key-punch IBM card batch computer processing at Stanford Polya Hall in 1967, followed by seven minutes showing the wonders of the PDP-1 based interactive display Thor Time Sharing System. The display screen graphics, online text entry, an ALGOL (GOGOL) compiler, running and debugging are shown for the John McCarthy chestnut programming problem, of finding the lowest positive number (spoiler it is 1729 = 10^3 + 9^3 = 12^3 + 1^3) which is the sum of two cubes in two different ways. Likely from the Martin Gardner's Scientific American column concerning Ramanujan and a Taxi Cab serial number. I see this problem was still in circulation recently as a Google interview question.
Les Earnest warns that the background music was used without permission from a Rolling Stones album and some Wagner and should be redacted. Given this item's insignificant visibility, poor quality, age and status as an academic artifact; I will await a take-down-order from the copyright owners. The orginal film did not cite its sources (and likely did not have permission) for using as background music a long segment from the Rolling Stones song Cool, Calm and Collected. Other people have uploaded this song in full, I see it available at this You Tube link or go directly to a music video at link The original song was released in the United States 11 February 1967 on the album titled Between the Buttons. The lyrics are at link and are useful to know in the unlikely event that you play this video for other people more than once.
There is also a 60 second snippet from Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries starting around 06:50 and a bit more again at 11:50. Which is readily found these days on You Tube at for example link in case you haven't been to Der Ring des Nibelungen opera.
There are several barely legible screen shots of the PDP-1 Thor character display, including the closing credits which I read as follows: Produced by John McCarthy and Gary Feldman, Written by Arthur Eisenbaum and Gary Feldman, Hamit Fisek as Ellis, also appearing Randy Seedlock, Urs Trepp, Dwight Johnson, voice John Jennings.
The 2-D sketch pad drawing demonstration is primitive, and goes on too long showing painfully slow light pen tracking, which is not explained in the movie. But some of us in the 1960s were totally entranced with the promise of Computer Graphics, and had suffered tablet and pen input efforts prior to the advent of SRI/Xerox mice.
The main actor in the movie is a Stanford pysch student, Hamit Fisek, who finished his Stanford PhD in 1969, MS 1968 and MA 1966. There is a sight gag at 02:43 when in the background a student buys an apple (or is it a ball) from the coffee vending machine and walks away bouncing it twice and then taking a bite. Modern viewers are horrified that smoking was permitted inside buildings at Stanford in the 1960s. The name "Ellis D. Kropotechnev" is a lame hippie joke which I attribute to John McCarthy, who I believe sold his house to Harvard Professor Timothy Leary before moving west to Stanford. Spell it out, Ellis D for LSD, the hallucinagenic drug, lysergic acid diethylamide.