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Chris McKinstry

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Kenneth Christopher McKinstry (February 12 1967 – January 23 2006) was a researcher in artificial intelligence. He led the development of the MISTIC project which was launched in May 1996. He founded the Mindpixel project in July 2000, and closed it in December 2005. Mckinstry's AI work and similar early death dovetailed with another contemporary AI researcher, Push Singh and his MIT Open Mind Common Sense Project. [1],[2]

Life

McKinstry was a Canadian citizen born in Winnipeg, he resided several years in Chile. Since 1999, he lived in Antofagasta as a VLT operator for the European Southern Observatory. At the end of 2004, he moved back to Santiago, Chile.

Suffering from emotional problems, Chris had an armed standoff with police in Toronto, Canada in 1990. [3] [4]

He was known on Usenet for engaging in flamewars and making extravagant claims about his technology [5], for example stating that "what history will remember is that the human race collectively started moving itself bit by literal bit into computers on December 23, 1994" with the launch of his software [6]. He once claimed that he became a millionaire at the age of 17 from inventing a copy protection scheme "marketed under the names oxylok, prolock, and mediaguard." [7] These claims have never been verified but Chris was a self-professed computer geek who through junior high and high school participated in city wide 'science fairs'.

Chris enjoyed discussing his drug use on Usenet (examples can be found in [1] and [2]). He was particularly fond of LSD. [8] In 1997, Chris McKinstry started an online soap opera entitled CR6. Like many other dot-coms, the start-up failed after several months. McKinstry claimed to have lost $1 million in the CR6 failure [9] (Full thread at [10] )

On January 20 2006, two postings appeared on McKinstry’s weblog. In one, entitled "Very Serious Thoughts on Suicide", he said, "Why am I writing this? Just as a matter of record, to prove I was here and ahead of all of you. Time to go," and then quoted a dozen aphorisms about suicide, such as "Suicide is man’s way of telling God, ‘You can’t fire me — I quit.’" (attributed to Bill Maher).

The other posting, entitled "So what exactly does a web suicide note look like?", was a suicide note. Chris wrote, "I am tired of feeling the same feelings and experiencing the same experiences. It is time to move on and see what is next if anything." The suicide posting ended, "This Louis Vuitton, Prada, Mont Blanc commercial universe is not for me. If only I was loved as much a Mont Blanc pen..."

Chris McKinstry was found dead in his apartment on January 23 2006 with a plastic bag over his head and "a hose that was connected to the gas pipe." [11]

Before his death McKinstry designed an experiment with two cognitive scientists to study the dynamics of thought processes using data from his Mindpixel project. This work has has now been published in Psychological Science in its January, 2008 issue[12], with McKinstry as posthumous first author.

Comparisons with Push Singh

There has been some public note of the similarity between the suicide of Chris McKinstry and that of Push Singh another AI Researcher a couple months later. Both of their AI projects, Mckinstry's Mindpixel project and Singh's MIT Institutionally backed Open Mind Common Sense, had had similar trajectories over the last six years. (Wired News) Both McKinstry and Singh were Canadians at some point (although Singh was born in India) of approximately the same age who had been in contact over the years in the same AI communities (AI Usenet 2000) regarding their similar projects. Both were heterodox AI researchers who were pursuing closely themed endeavours and beta software projects.

For a few online comparisons on McKinstry and Singh, see Streeb-Greebling, KurzweilAInet, Soup, and the latest story published by Wired Magazine, Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened? (Jan 18, 2008).

Articles

  • Minimum Intelligent Signal Test: An Alternative Turing Test, Canadian Artificial Intelligence #41
  • A Closer Look at Life in the Summer of '76, Mindjack Magazine, 2001
  • Passage through science, Mindjack Magazine, 2001
  • Twenty Twenty: Astronomical Vision, Mindjack Magazine, 2002
  • A Hacker Goes to Iraq, Article posted by Chris McKinstry, The Hacker Quarterly, Vol 20 Number one, Page 9, [3]
  • Mind as Space, The Turing Test Sourcebook: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003
  • McKinstry, C., Dale, R., & Spivey, M.J. (2008). Action dynamics reveal parallel competition in decision making. Psychological Science, 19, 22-24.

References

  1. ^ http://streebgreebling.blogspot.com/2006/01/legends-in-ai-chris-mckinstry.html
  2. ^ http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0678.html?],[http://www.alphabetsoup.cl/blog/2006/05/mindpixel-crashes.html
  3. ^ http://groups.google.ca/group/wpg.general/msg/2764a9158359f7b8?dmode=source
  4. ^ http://groups.google.ca/group/wpg.general/msg/42073915fd22e6ea?dmode=source
  5. ^ http://www.robotwisdom.com/ai/mckinstry.html
  6. ^ http://groups.google.com/group/comp.ai.nat-lang/msg/672a5fc5a86f850b
  7. ^ http://groups.google.com/group/wpg.general/msg/3d5906b2bf387f1b?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off
  8. ^ http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&q=group%3Aalt.drugs&qt_s=Search&enc_author=TXXxmxIAAABmFsVfs2py6k7mxvUQ5FwCa-o86qnWqi4QtyUzzs6lJg
  9. ^ http://groups.google.com/group/wpg.general/msg/c83d6ed73b00af9c?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off
  10. ^ http://groups.google.com/group/wpg.general/tree/browse_frm/thread/478641328950e5af/2797159f34d83e47?rnum=1&_done=%2Fgroup%2Fwpg.general%2Fbrowse_frm%2Fthread%2F478641328950e5af%2Fc83d6ed73b00af9c%3F#doc_2797159f34d83e47
  11. ^ http://www.dashslot.co.uk/chris-mckinstry.htm
  12. ^ McKinstry, C., Dale, R., & Spivey, M.J. (2008). Action dynamics reveal parallel competition in decision making. Psychological Science, 19, 22-24. http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/index.cfm?journal=ps&content=ps/19_1
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