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Edinburgh's Burning
Landmark AI Department Goes up in Flames
 
Edinburgh's Burning

One of the most influential AI departments over the past four decades has gone up in flames. On Saturday night, a fire broke out below the South Bridge building of the University of Edinburgh. It was the worst in living memory for the old town, and could take another couple days for the fire teams to extinguish (BBC News coverage, some pictures).

There were no human victims, but the most of the hardware seems to have been lost, not forgetting the recently expanded AI library, which contained many unique dissertations and rare proceedings. This is a great tragedy, I'd like to express the deepest regrets to those involved on behalf of the community and our full support.

934 posts.
Monday 09 December, 07:42
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Holy smoke


Oh that is a shame. The Edinburgh AI department was one of the few
that I've ever visited. I remember going there as a clueless 18
year old student, seeing an industrial robot play the "blocks world"
problem and listening to some bloke saying that we were entering "a
new era of intelligent machines" (circa 1990). Later on in 1996 I
went there for a meeting on evolutionary robotics and listened to
speeches by the likes of Gillian Hayes and John Hallam. I saw
demonstrations of a few different robots. One was a large black
trashcan (probably a RWI robot) with a video camera on top, another
was a tiny robot which pretended to be a female cricket and was able
to home in on the sounds of male crickets chirping in a small cage.
There was also a demonstration by Aude Billard of lego robots
learning to follow each other inside what looked like a rabbit
hutch.

It's sad when things go wrong, but I hope they're able to use the
tragedy as an opportunity to rebuild bigger and better than before.
It's rare that you get the opportunity to begin from a completely
blank slate.

- Bob

136 posts.
Tuesday 10 December, 02:47
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