Danny Hillis, in full William Daniel Hillis, Jr., (born September 25, 1956, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.), American pioneer of parallel processing computer systems and founding father of Thinking Machines Corporation.
The son of a U.S. Air Force epidemiologist, Hillis spent his early years touring overseas along with his household and being homeschooled. Like his father, he developed an curiosity in biology, whereas his mom nurtured his curiosity in arithmetic. An inveterate tinkerer who invented with no matter was at hand, Hillis, on the age of 9, constructed his first “computer” out of a phonograph participant; he later constructed a tick-tack-toe-playing pc out of Tinkertoys. The Hillis household returned to Baltimore in 1968 in order that Daniel would possibly attend faculty whereas his mom began graduate work in biostatistics.
In 1974 Hillis enrolled on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to check neurophysiology. Soon he discovered his option to the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the place he met the pioneering synthetic intelligence theorist Marvin Minsky. At Minsky’s laboratory Hillis and coworkers developed a graphical consumer interface for the Logo pc programming language for youngsters. While engaged on Logo, Hillis realized that Minsky was constructing a pc, so he learn the design plans and studied the machine. Minsky was so impressed by Hillis’s steered enhancements that he took Hillis on as a pupil and supplied him with a room in his residence. Meanwhile, Hillis modified his main to arithmetic (B.S., 1978) after which pc science (M.S., 1981).
While working at Minsky’s laboratory, Hillis pioneered a brand new method to computing. He had lengthy been intrigued by the character of thought and wished to make a pc that may assist in understanding human cognition. He discovered odd computer systems, which executed operations in a sequential trend on a single processor, to be unwieldy devices for learning the mind. Hillis imagined that human thought arises from the operations of tens of millions of neurons interacting and dealing on issues in various methods—in pc parlance, massively parallel processing. Although Seymour Cray had constructed the Cray X-MP (for multiprocessor) in 1982 by linking collectively two Cray-1 supercomputers, the frequent knowledge was {that a} massively parallel pc system could be inherently inefficient. Hillis set about to problem that concept by constructing a machine composed of hundreds of easy processors programmed to work and work together collectively. Initially, Hillis wished to see whether or not intelligence would possibly come up from such a brand new structure, however the idea quickly grew to become a enterprise in addition to a analysis matter.
In 1983, with Minsky’s encouragement, Hillis based Thinking Machines Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its first product was the Connection Machine, and its first buyer the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The Connection Machine used commercially accessible processors linked collectively to carry out operations in parallel. (One of the summer season staff on the challenge was Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman.) In 1985 the primary 65,536-processor Connection Machine was accomplished; it was comparable in computational energy to the world’s quickest supercomputer, the Cray-2, however vastly cheaper to construct. (The Cray machines relied on very costly custom-designed processors; the Connection Machine used easy one-bit, or off-on, processors.) In 1985 Hillis revealed his doctoral dissertation as The Connection Machine, and in 1988 he earned his Ph.D. In addition, he was the editor of A New Era in Computation (1992), and he wrote The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work (1998), amongst different books.
In 1994 Thinking Machines filed for chapter, and the next 12 months Hillis returned to MIT as an adjunct professor. He began his personal consulting firm. In 1996 Hillis grew to become the vp of analysis and growth on the Walt Disney Company’s Imagineering Department, the place he was already a guide on the division’s main duty of researching and creating, or “imagineering,” rides and points of interest for Disney’s theme parks. Hillis’s new place marked the rising convergence of leisure and computing expertise.
Also in 1996 Hillis and others established the Long Now Foundation, created to develop a multigenerational perspective on many points going through civilization. The basis’s most well-known challenge was a mechanical clock designed to final for not less than 10,000 years—an acceptable problem for an unconventional and provocative thinker. In 2000 Hillis left Disney to cofound Applied Minds, a expertise and R&D agency. In 2014 he based the spinoff firm Applied Invention.