About

My name is Peter Chapman. I am a software engineer. I fell in love with programming at a very early age and at a time when the computer industry was just starting to take off.

I started coding at 16 at the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence laboratory. The lab was run by Marvin Minsky, (the father of A.I.) who my Dad had known. I worked on two projects: Working on the logo language itself and the other to write logo programs that would learn a maze (using floor turtles). As part of my work, I published my first paper “Of Mice and Men” about the program that learned mazes. The reference to Mice, was for the floor turtles, not the pointing devices of the same name that were still a number of years off.

What became clear to me at the time was that computers didn’t have the power to implement Strong A.I. and was still many years away. So, I left the field of A.I. to take my first job working on Wall Street and wrote the world’s first computerized trading system.

My goal had been to retire at forty. I had set this goal when I was 14. I have known that I wanted to be entrepreneur and have my own company. At thirty-nine, I sold my company to Thomson Financial and retired (beating my goal by only a couple of months). After several years of various non-computer related projects, I decided to build a vacation house on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee. I built the house with my two sons from the foundation up (that’s another store for another time). The new house is 90 miles away from my home in Boston. Each day for two years, I would commute to work for an hour and a half (each way). I cherished these times because it gave me a block of time to think un-interrupted. And I started to think again about Strong A.I. and how to implement it. So this project had over two thousand hours in design work put into it over a period of two years.

I had a design and the pieces required to make this work, but it was still a daunting task ahead of me. I estimated there was about 5 years worth of work and only towards the end, would I know if it would work. Just as I was completing the house, I saw an online listing to help a little startup with their applications to help blind people. And more intriguing, the startup was run by Ray Kurzweil, the famed futurist.
Partly because the amount of work was so large, and working on something for social good rather than money, I joined the company with his band of merry misfits to work on their blindness applications.
Fast forward a couple of years and my day job has been working as a president of a portfolio company of Ray Kurzweil, who is now working on this problem for Google.

And now with the world of cloud computing, it seemed that we now finally have enough computing resources to build the first strong A.I. engine. I will have to admit, it was Ray’s transition to Google and reading his most recent book that got me thinking about A.I. again. He has had a good track record of timing advances in technology and leap-frog technologies (as the inventor of speech recognition, OCR, Text to Speech, digital music, etc.).
And that leads to the question: Why now? After all, the strong A.I. landscape is littered with broken promises. The short answer is that many parts of my design of a couple of years back are now available in commercial form. In fact, had I started years ago, I think I would behind today and the quality of the resulting product would have suffered. The necessary pieces are now all available.

So, in my spare time and with the help of my two sons: Nick and Chris, we have started down this ambitious path.
Nick, a high school senior (and will be attending Georgetown in the fall) has created his own software consulting firm which has built a bunch of high-profile websites. Like me, he has the “programming fever”. Chris, who is out of college has gone green in a big way and started his own farm. While not fooling around with dirt, is programming as well.

I expect over the coming months, we will add other crazy fools like ourselves to the project. We are in a space race against several giants such as Google, IBM, Microsoft, Nuance, etc., however, none of them have cracked this puzzle. And even if one does, that just means the others (and everyone else) will need this project. This is a problem too that has no obvious answer, so I am not too worried about the big guys. At this stage, I think their current space race is mostly about research, not a working product.

So, the game is afoot.