Shakey: From Conception to History

At AAAI-15 (25–29 January 2015) in Austin, Texas, we met to celebrate the impact of the Shakey project, which took place from 1966 to 1972 at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) in Menlo Park. We researchers in artificial intelligence during this time in history have the privilege of working on some of the most fundamental and exciting scientific and engineering problems of all time: What is a mind? How can a physical object have a mind? Some of the work going on today will appear in future textbooks, even centuries from now. We gain insights into our own struggles in the field today by learning about the historical struggles of great scientists of the past about whom we read in today’s textbooks. The textbooks tempt us to think that they moved surely and confidently from questions to answers. In reality, they were frequently as confused then as we are now, by the mysterious phenomena they were trying to understand. When we read their history, we know the