RE: Lisp

[Drew Adams]

> >> There was some kind of "AI group" started in the late 50s By
> >> McCarthy and Minsky
> >
> > I think you're talking about Project MAC.
> 
> No.  The AI project, before becoming the "AI lab", was formed before
> Project MAC.  This paper is a detailed history of the beginning of the
> AI group, how they joined Project MAC, and later split off.
> 
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://worrydream.com/refs/FoundingOfTheAIL
> ab.pdf__;!!GqivPVa7Brio!Ix2lXvk8H5rpyIQcCMipdWRTVua-
> onGhmwhcfQX9WK38NQ2_C91_atdXBCBThc6s$

Great; thanks.  The Wikipedia article says only this:

  An "AI Group" including Marvin Minsky (the director),
  John McCarthy (inventor of Lisp) and a talented community
  of computer programmers was incorporated into the newly
  formed Project MAC.

But the article you cite makes clear that the relation was
never simply "incorporation".

Even the abstract of the article you cite makes the relation clear:

  From the very beginning of Project MAC, the AI Group
  represented a significant portion of the project, receiving
  roughly one third of its total funding from ARPA. However,
  due to a number of reasons including differences in mission
  and culture, the AI Group and the rest of Project MAC never
  became bound to each other. By 1970, they depended on each
  other only minimally and they were not relevant enough to
  each other to necessitate being part of a single entity.
  The 1970 decision of the AI Group to split from Project MAC
  was due to a confluence of issues and only formalized a split
  that had already existed between the two groups for a
  considerable time.

This is maybe the best part of that article, of which there
are lots of good parts:

  'Why did you make the net random?' and I said, 'Well, I
  didn't want it to have preconceived misconceptions', and he said,
  'Well it has them, its just that you don't know what they are.'