From an article by David L. Chandler on Physorg, a capsule of the early education of Rodney Brooks, the robotics experts from Errol Morris’ great film, Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control:

“The former director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) described growing up in in Adelaide, Australia. While he had never heard of MIT, he was an inveterate tinkerer who became intrigued early on by robotics.

In the early 1960s, Brooks recalled, he built a very primitive computer, using vacuum tubes, that had a total random access memory capacity of 64 bits (or 8 bytes) and took a year and a half to build. He then went on to build a very simple robot that remained in his mother’s garden shed for the next 30 years, he said.

After seeing the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, he became intrigued by HAL, the movie’s intelligent, responsive computer. ‘He was a murdering psychopath,’ Brooks quipped — but nonetheless an impressive portrayal of machine intelligence.

Brooks’ first exposure to the Institute came when he read that an MIT professor named Marvin Minsky had been a consultant to filmmaker Stanley Kubrick; he immediately decided he wanted to attend MIT.

That dream took a while to realize: Brooks was turned down for graduate school at MIT, and turned down again — twice — for faculty positions after earning his doctorate at Stanford University. ‘Rejection is not the end,’ he advised the students, saying that it’s important to persevere in pursuit of one’s dreams: ‘Persistence pays off.'”

••••••••••

Rodney Brooks, roboticist: