Danny Hillis

Danny Hillis is an American pioneer of parallel processing computers and founder of Thinking Machines Corporation.

The son of a U.S. Air Force epidemiologist, Hillis spent his early years traveling abroad with his family and being homeschooled. Like his father, he developed an interest in biology, while his mother nurtured his interest in mathematics. An inveterate tinkerer who invented with whatever was at hand, Hillis, at the age of nine, built his first “computer” out of a phonograph player; he later built a tick-tack-toe-playing computer out of Tinkertoys. The Hillis family returned to Baltimore in 1968 so that Daniel might attend school while his mother started graduate work in biostatistics.

In 1974 Hillis enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to study neurophysiology. Soon he found his way to the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he met the pioneering artificial intelligence theorist Marvin Minsky. At Minsky’s laboratory Hillis and coworkers developed a graphical user interface for the Logo computer programming language for children. While working on Logo, Hillis learned that Minsky was building a computer, so he read the design plans and studied the machine. Minsky was so impressed by Hillis’s suggested improvements that he took Hillis on as a student and provided him with a room in his home. Meanwhile, Hillis changed his major to mathematics (B.S., 1978) and then computer science (M.S., 1981).

While working at Minsky’s laboratory, Hillis pioneered a new approach to computing. He had long been intrigued by the nature of thought and wanted to make a computer that might aid in understanding human cognition. He found ordinary computers, which executed operations in a sequential fashion on a single processor, to be unwieldy instruments for studying the brain. Hillis imagined that human thought arises from the operations of millions of neurons interacting and working on problems in diverse ways—in computer parlance, massively parallel processing. Although Seymour Cray had built the Cray X-MP (for multiprocessor) in 1982 by linking together two Cray-1 supercomputers, the common wisdom was that a massively parallel computer system would be inherently inefficient. Hillis set about to challenge that idea by building a machine composed of thousands of simple processors programmed to work and interact together. Initially, Hillis wanted to see whether intelligence might arise from such a new architecture, but the concept soon became a business as well as a research topic.

In 1983, with Minsky’s encouragement, Hillis founded Thinking Machines Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its first product was the Connection Machine, and its first customer the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The Connection Machine used commercially available processors connected together to perform operations in parallel. (One of the summer workers on the project was Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman.) In 1985 the first 65,536-processor Connection Machine was completed; it was comparable in computational power to the world’s fastest supercomputer, the Cray-2, but vastly cheaper to build. (The Cray machines relied on very expensive custom-designed processors; the Connection Machine used simple one-bit, or off-on, processors.) In 1985 Hillis published 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), among other books.

In 1994 Thinking Machines filed for bankruptcy, and the following year Hillis returned to MIT as an adjunct professor. He started his own consulting company. In 1996 Hillis became the vice president of research and development at the Walt Disney Company’s Imagineering Department, where he was already a consultant on the department’s primary responsibility of researching and developing, or “imagineering,” rides and attractions for Disney’s theme parks. Hillis’s new position marked the growing convergence of entertainment and computing technology.

Also in 1996 Hillis and others established the Long Now Foundation, created to develop a multigenerational perspective on many issues facing civilization. The foundation’s most famous project was a mechanical clock designed to last for at least 10,000 years—an appropriate challenge for an unconventional and provocative thinker. In 2000 Hillis left Disney to cofound Applied Minds, a technology and R&D firm. In 2014 he founded the spinoff company Applied Invention.

Cathy Lazere and Dennis Shasha, Out of Their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists (1995; reissued 1998), primarily focuses on the scientists’ contributions, such as Hillis’s work on the Connection Machine, but includes some biographical information.