Vivarium Project

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 26 Dec 2023 06:57
Open in Logseq
    • A research project led by Alan Kay and Ann Marion, sponsored by Apple, with contributions from the MIT Media Lab and many others. There's surprisingly little public writing about this important and influential nexus of work.
    • The mission

      • look closely at animal minds and ways to model them
      • use those insights to come up with new ideas for programming languages and environments
      • design child-friendly versions of those models, languages, and systems
    • Using ideas from:

      • AI languages (eg rule systems)
      • Society of Mind
      • ethology
      • situated action / behavioral robotics
    • maxresdefault.jpg
    • Alan Kay and some MIT grad students visit the LA Open School
    • The Blimp

      • One of the earliest projects at MIT was to build a robot blimp that could be controlled by simple a simple end-user-friendly programming language. This was in part inspired by the Wiesner Building's vast and otherwise kind of useless four-story atrium.
      • The blimp was based on a commerical RC kit we found; we augmented it with some ultrasonic rangefinders from a polaroid camera kit, and interfaced the sensors and motors to a visual programming language (the Hookup! language developed by Dave Levitt).