Seymour Papert
Artificial intelligence guru who thought computer programming could transform lives
SEYMOUR PAPERT, who has died aged 88, held the title Lego Professor for Learning Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was a world expert on IT and learning – and artificial intelligence. Once described as a “cross between Robin Williams in the movie Toys and Albert Einstein”, Papert argued that children, in all societies, can master computing, not just their simple operation but the writing of computer code (programming) as well. That learning process, he believed, could transform how individuals learn throughout their lives and, therefore, effect social change.
He was an enemy of what he saw as the tyranny of formal education systems which he believed equip children only to master set syllabuses. Computers, he believed, could teach children how to learn for themselves through playful problem-solving, leading to their development as more rounded human beings. “I think the school is an extremely harmful institution,” he said. “I think the schools do more harm than Nintendo.”
In 1967 Papert created a programming language called Logo that could be used to control a clear plastic turtle-shaped robot. The “turtle”, which children could command to draw patterns – on paper at first and later on a video screen – was the first of several so-called children’s machines which he devised, which would eventually morph into the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO, an inexpensive computer intended to be distributed to children in developing countries around the world.
Nicholas Negroponte – brother of John, George Bush’s controversial director of national intelligence – a student and later colleague of Papert at MIT – would become the founder and driving force behind OLPC.
“The child programs the computer,” Papert explained. “And in teaching the computer how to think, children embark on an exploration about how they think. The experience can be heady: thinking about thinking turns the child into an epistemologist.”
Logo prospered for a while, but at the time Papert created it computers were still large and expensive machines with which most adults, let alone children, did not interact in daily life. Logo, therefore, soon faded from view.
However, Papert’s invention caught the eye of the Danish toy maker, Lego, and in 1984 Papert began a collaboration with the company which, after many years of research, led to the “intelligent brick”. Unveiled in 1998, the “brick”, the size of a pack of cards and code-named RCX, was capable of being programmed and contained an integral microchip and sensor so that anything a child built from the brick would not just remain inert – it could turn round and play with its creator.
As part of his research, Papert recalled, one boy from an elementary school in Boston had created an alarm clock that recognised the sun’s rays, and set a chain of events into action which ended with the sleeper – a Lego man – being turfed out of his bed on to a conveyor belt. Another class of 11-year-olds created Lego dinosaurs that could follow a light source, while a 10-year-old girl used the programmable bricks to build an automated bird feeder. Whenever a bird landed, it would trigger a sensor, activating a Lego mechanism attached to a camera that took a picture of the bird.
The brick gave rise to the Lego Mindstorms range of robotic toys, named after Papert’s most influential book, Mindstorms: Children,
Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980). “When you give children this kind of material, very often they perform at an intellectual level that astonishes their teachers and themselves,” he said. “We have seen many kids reconverted to the joy of learning. If you provide children with the right tools and materials to play with they can learn ideas that were reserved for the university classroom in the paper-and-pencil era.”
Seymour Aubrey Papert was born on February 29 1928 in Pretoria, South Africa, where his father was an entomologist. He took a degree in Philosophy followed by a PhD in Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he was active in the anti-apartheid movement, followed by another PhD at Cambridge University in 1959.
He went on to do post-doctoral research on mathematics and children’s education at the University of Geneva, under the psychologist Jean Piaget, who taught that play was a vital part of a child’s cognitive development.
In 1960, Papert attended a cybernetics conference in London where he met Marvin Minsky, the co-founder of the artificial intelligence group at MIT. Papert moved to MIT in 1963 at a time when there was a schism in the American computer science community between those who sought to develop intelligent software by whatever practical means, and those who based their work on the similation of the cognitive processes that go on in the human brain. The latter group were in the ascendancy, attracting the lion’s share of funding, until 1969 when Papert and Minsky published Perceptrons (1969), in which they demonstrated that the neuron structures used by researchers were severely limited in their capability.
In 1985, when Nicholas Negroponte founded MIT’s Media Lab, Papert and Minsky were two of the three original faculty members. Papert worked on numerous Media Lab projects and was Lego Professor for Learning Research from 1989 until 1996.
In later life Papert moved to Maine, where he set up a Learning Barn and a Learning Lab for troubled teenagers.
He is survived by his fourth wife Suzanne, whom he married in 1992; by a daughter from his second marriage, and by three stepchildren. Seymour Papert, born February 29 1928, died July 31 2016