Brad Darrach

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“All At Once I Got Gooseflesh”

July 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

If Brad Darrach hadn’t also profiled Bobby Fischer, the autonomous robot named Shakey would have been the most famous malfunctioning machine he ever wrote about. 

The John Markoff’s Harper’s piece I posted about earlier made mention of Shakey, the so-called “first electronic person,” which struggled to take baby steps on its own during the 1960s at the Stanford Research Institute. The machine’s intelligence was glacial, and much to the chagrin of its creators, it did not show rapid progress in the years that followed, as Moore’s Law forgot to do its magic.

Although Darrach’s 1970 Life piece mostly focuses on the Palo Alto area, it ventured to the other coast to allegedly record this extravagantly wrong prediction from MIT genius Marvin Minsky: “In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the generaL intelligence of an average human being. I mean a machine that will he able to read Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell a joke, have a fight.” The thing is, Minsky immediately and vehemently denied the quote and since other parts of the piece’s veracity were also questioned, I believe his disavowal.

The Life article (which misspelled the robot’s name as “Shaky”), for its many flaws and ethical lapses, did sagely acknowledge the potential for a post-work world and the advent of superintelligence and the challenges those developments might bring. The opening:

It looked at first glance like a Good Humor wagon sadly in need of a spring paint job. But instead of a tinkly little bell on top of its box-shaped body there was this big mechanical whangdoodle that came rearing up, full of lenses and cables, like a junk sculpture gargoyle.

“Meet Shaky,” said the young scientist who was showing me through the Stanford Research Institute. “The first electronic person.”

I looked for a twinkle in the scientist’s eye. There wasn’t any. Sober as an equation, he sat down at an input ter minal and typed out a terse instruction which was fed into Shaky’s “brain,” a computer set up in a nearby room: PUSH THE BLOCK OFF THE PLATFORM.

Something inside Shaky began to hum. A large glass prism shaped like a thick slice of pie and set in the middle of what passed for his face spun faster and faster till it disolved into a glare then his superstructure made a slow 360degree turn and his face leaned forward and seemed to be staring at the floor. As the hum rose to a whir, Shaky rolled slowly out of the room, rotated his superstructure again and turned left down the corridor at about four miles an hour, still staring at the floor.

“Guides himself by watching the baseboards,” the scientist explained as he hurried to keep up. At every open door Shaky stopped, turned his head, inspected the room, turned away and idled on to the next open door. In the fourth room he saw what he was looking for: a platform one foot high and eight feet long with a large wooden block sitting on it. He went in, then stopped short in the middle of the room and stared for about five seconds at the platform. I stared at it too.

“He’ll never make it.” I found myself thinking “His wheels are too small.” All at once I got gooseflesh. “Shaky,” I realized, ”is thinking the same thing I am thinking!”

Shaky was also thinking faster. He rotated his head slowly till his eye came to rest on a wide shallow ramp that was lying on the floor on the other side of the room. Whirring brisky, he crossed to the ramp, semicircled it and then pushed it straight across the floor till the high end of the ramp hit the platform. Rolling back a few feet, he cased the situation again and discovered that only one corner of the ramp was touching the platform. Rolling quickly to the far side of the ramp, he nudged it till the gap closed. Then he swung around, charged up the slope, located the block and gently pushed it off the platform.

Compared to the glamorous electronic elves who trundle across television screens, Shaky may not seem like much. No death-ray eyes, no secret transistorized lust for nubile lab technicians. But in fact he is a historic achievement. The task I saw him perform would tax the talents of a lively 4-year-old child, and the men who over the last two years have headed up the Shaky project—Charles Rosen, Nils Nilsson and Bert Raphael—say he is capable of far more sophisticated routines. Armed with the right devices and programmed in advance with basic instructions, Shaky could travel about the moon for months at a time and, without a single beep of direction from the earth, could gather rocks, drill Cores, make surveys and photographs and even decide to lay plank bridges over crevices he had made up his mind to cross.

The center of all this intricate activity is Shaky’s “brain,” a remarkably programmed computer with a capacity more than 1 million “bits” of information. In defiance of the soothing conventional view that the computer is just a glorified abacuus, that cannot possibly challenge the human monopoly of reason. Shaky’s brain demonstrates that machines can think. Variously defined, thinking includes processes as “exercising the powers of judgment” and “reflecting for the purpose of reaching a conclusion.” In some at these respects—among them powers of recall and mathematical agility–Shaky’s brain can think better than the human mind.

Marvin Minsky of MIT’s Project Mac, a 42-year-old polymath who has made major contributions to Artificial Intelligence, recently told me with quiet certitude, “In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the generaL intelligence of an average human being. I mean a machine that will he able to read Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell a joke, have a fight. At that point the machine will begin to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months it will be at genius level and a few months after that its powers will be incalculable.”

I had to smile at my instant credulity—the nervous sort of smile that comes when you realize you’ve been taken in by a clever piece of science fiction. When I checked Minsky’s prophecy with other people working on Artificial Intelligence, however, many at them said that Minsky’s timetable might be somewhat wishful—”give us 15 years,” was a common remark—but all agreed that there would be such a machine and that it could precipitate the third Industrial Revolution, wipe out war and poverty and roll up centuries of growth in science, education and the arts. At the same time a number of computer scientists fear that the godsend may become a Golem. “Man’s limited mind,” says Minsky, “may not be able to control such immense mentalities.”•

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“Bobby Decided That The Last Thing He Wanted After His Triumph Was The World That Lay At His Feet”

July 30, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Speaking of chess prodigies who declined young, Bobby Fischer, who was profiled in Life by Brad Darrach in 1971 prior to his Cold War showdown with champion Boris Spassky, was the subject of the same writer for sister publication People in 1974, two years after dispatching of his Soviet opponent and becoming one of the most famous people on Earth. Darrach wrote of Fischer as a man who’d shaken off the world’s embrace, who had briefly found God–one of them, anyhow–and had entered into an exile from the game. What the piece couldn’t have predicted is that he would never really play another meaningful match. The opening of “The Secret Life of Bobby Fischer“:

Whatever happened to Bobby Fischer? Six weeks after winning the world chess championship on Sept. 1, 1972, he abruptly vanished without a trace into the brown haze of Greater Los Angeles. Rumors flew, but the truth was weirder than the rumors.

At the pinnacle of chess success, Bobby abandoned the game that had made him famous and took up residence in a closed California community of religious extremists. With rare exceptions, the world outside has not seen or heard of him for more than 16 months. Reporters who tried to track him down were turned back by the private police force that patrols the church property in Pasadena.

On the day he finished off his great Russian opponent, Boris Spassky, in Iceland, Bobby had realized the first of his three main ambitions. The second, he said, was ‘to make chess a major sport in the United States.’ The third was to be ‘the first chess millionaire.’ As history’s first purely intellectual superstar, Bobby was offered record deals, TV specials, book contracts, product endorsements. ‘He could make $10 million in the next two, three years,’ his lawyer said after Bobby’s victory at Reykjavik. And to promote chess, Bobby promised to put his title on the line ‘at least twice a year, maybe more.’ Millions of chess amateurs enthused at the prospect of a Fischer era of storm, stress and magnificent competition.

But it didn’t happen quite like that. After curtly declining New York Mayor Lindsay’s offer of a ticker-tape parade (“I don’t believe in hero worship”), Bobby made impulsive appearances on the Bob Hope and Johnny Carson shows—and then was swallowed up by the Worldwide Church of God, a fundamentalist sect founded in 1934 by a former adman named Herbert W. Armstrong. Well advertised on radio and television by Armstrong’s hellfire preaching—and more recently by the charm-drenched sermons of Garner Ted Armstrong, the founder’s son—the church now claims 85,000 members. They celebrate the sabbath on Saturday and observe the dietary laws of the Old Testament—no pork, no shellfish. Smoking, divorce and cheek-to-cheek dancing are forbidden. Necking is the worst kind of sin. Tithing is mandatory—the church’s annual income probably exceeds $50 million. Church leaders live palatially and gad about the world in three executive jets provided by the faithful. Recently, however, scandals and schisms have shaken the flock.

Bobby Fischer, the child of a Jewish mother and a Gentile father, first tuned in on the elder Armstrong while still in his late teens. Lonely and despairing after he muffed his chance to become world champion at 19—Bobby found strength in the church’s teachings and has adhered to them closely ever since. He turned to the church in the crisis he faced after Reykjavik. Verging on nervous exhaustion after his two-month battle with Spassky and the match organizers, Bobby decided that the last thing he wanted after his triumph was the world that lay at his feet. In the large and outwardly peaceful community that surrounds the Armstrong headquarters, he saw a safe setting where he could unsnarl his nerves and find the normal life that he had sacrificed to competition and monomania.

The church welcomed him. Though Bobby is not a full church member—he is listed as a ‘coworker’—he offered Armstrong a double tithe (20%) of his $156,250 winnings. ‘Ah, my boy, that’s just as God would have it!’ Armstrong replied, and passed the word that Bobby was to be given VIP treatment. A pleasant three-bedroom apartment in a church-owned development was made available. So were the gymnasium, squash courts and swimming pool of the church’s Ambassador College. Leaders of the Armstrong organization were told to make sure that Bobby had plenty of dinner invitations. “The word went out,” says a church member, “that Bobby should never be left alone, or allowed to feel neglected.”

To make doubly sure, the church assigned a friendly weightlifter in the phys. ed. department as Bobby’s personal recreation director. The two of them played paddle tennis almost every day, and Bobby worked out with weights to build up his arms and torso.

Not long after he arrived in Pasadena, the 31-year-old Bobby confessed to a high church official that he wanted to meet some girls. There is a rigid rule against dating between church members and nonmembers like Bobby, but the official allowed that in Bobby’s case the rule would be suspended. What sort of girls did he like? Bobby said that he liked “vivacious” girls with “big breasts.” A suitable girl was discovered and Bobby began to date her frequently, taking the weightlifter and his wife along as chaperones.•

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“His Smile Was Broad And Boyish But His Eyes Were Wary”

March 6, 2012 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Fischer, Yugoslavia, 1961.

Long before anyone knew that the earth beneath his feet would shake ever more violently with time, chess champion Bobby Fischer seemed like an eccentric winner–though definitely a winner. The paranoid accusations and erratic mood swings, however, weren’t merely gamesmanship or arrogance but harbingers of a serious mental illness that would eventually manifest itself in antisemitism and derangement. The opening of Brad Darrach’s 1971 Life profile, “Bobby Is a Ferocious Winner,” at a time when he was still considered combustible by nature rather than condemned by it:

“Angry voices rattles the door to Bobby Fischer’s hotel room as I raised my hand to knock. ‘Goddamnit, I’m sick of it!’ I heard Bobby shouting. ‘I’m sick of seeing people! I got to work, I got to rest! Why didn’t you ask me before you set up all those appointments? To hell with them!’ Then I heard the mild and dignified executive director of the U.S. Chess Federation addressing the man who may well be the greatest chess player in world history in a tone just slightly lower than a yell: ‘Bobby, ever since we came to Buenos Aires I’ve done nothing but take care of you, day and night. You ungrateful—-!’

It was 3 p.m., a bit early for Fischer to be up. Ten minutes later, finding the hall silent. I risked a knock and Fischer cracked the door. ‘Oh yeah, the guy from Life. Come on in.’ His smile was broad and boyish but his eyes were wary. Tall, wide and flat, with a head too small for his big body, he put me in mind of a pale transhuman sculpture by Henry Moore. I had seen him twice before but never so tired.

Just inside the door I stopped short. The room looked like a terminal moraine of bachelorhood. Bedclothes in tortured piles on the floor. Socks, underwear, bags, newspapers, magazines jumbled on the spare bed. Boxes stacked all over the couch, and on the floor between the beds a single graceful banana peel. The only clean place in the room was a small table by the window, where a set of handsome wooden chessmen had been set up for play. Serenely beautiful, an altar in the debris of battle.”

 

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“Dennis Hopper Was Undisturbed. Furor Trails Him Like A Pet Anaconda.”

April 29, 2011 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Open Culture posted a bunch of Andy Warhol screen tests, including the Dennis Hopper one from 1965, which reminded me of “The Easy Rider Runs Wild in the Andes,” a great 1970 Life magazine article about Hopper that I came across on Google Books. At the time of the Life piece, Hopper had carte blanche to do whatever he wanted as a filmmaker thanks to the Easy Rider phenomenon. Such freedom poses dangers for a free spirit. Hopper went to Peru with a cast that included Samuel Fuller and Toni Basil, and embarked on a quixotic, confused project, eventually entitled The Last Movie, which pissed away all of his new capital. His career never completely recovered until his insane turn in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

From Brad Darrach’s Life article: “Peru has painfully learned to live with earthquakes, avalanches, tidal waves, jaguars and poisonous snakes. But Dennis Hopper was something else. When the director of Easy Rider arrived in Lima several months ago, a reporter from La Prensa asked his opinion of marijuana (illegal in Peru) and ‘homosexualism.’ Taking a long reflective pull on an odd-looking cigarette. Dennis said he thought everybody should ‘do his thing,’ and then allowed that he himself had lived with a lesbian and found it ‘groovy.’ No remotely comparable statement had ever appeared in a Peruvian newspaper. The clergy screamed, the ruling junta’s colonels howled. Within 24 hours the government denounced the article and issued a decree repealing freedom of the press.

Dennis Hopper was undisturbed. Furor trails him like a pet anaconda. At 34, he is known in Hollywood as a sullen renegade who talks revolution, settles arguments with karate, goes to bed with groups and has taken trips on everything you can swallow or shoot.

On the other hand, in the salons and galleries of Los Angeles and New York he is recognized as a talented poet, painter, sculptor, photographer and as a leading collector of pop-art. He is also, after eight years on the movie industry’s blacklist, the hottest director in Hollywood. Easy Rider, which cost only $370,000, is rapidly approaching a projected $50 million gross. In the process it has polarized a new film audience of under-30s, generated a new school of talented young directors such as Jack Nicholson, Peter Bogdanovich, Richard Rush and Melvin Van Peebles, and established the style of a New Hollywood in which producers wear love beads instead of diamond stickpins and blow grass when they used to chew Coronoas.”

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