Chris McKinstry

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][3]

Chris McKinstry
Born
Kenneth Christopher McKinstry

(1967-02-12)February 12, 1967
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
DiedJanuary 23, 2006(2006-01-23) (aged 38)
Santiago, Chile
OccupationAI researcher

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 bipolar disorder, McKinstry had an armed standoff with police in Toronto in 1990.[4][5]

He was known on the Internet for discussing his drug use[6] and making extravagant claims about his technology.[7][8] He 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",[9] however, this claim has never been verified.

In 1997, Chris McKinstry started an online soap opera, CR6. Like many other dot-coms, the start-up failed after several months. McKinstry claimed to have lost $1 million in the CR6 failure, and the many people he recruited to build the soap opera, including photographers, writers, a director, and several prominent businesses, never received any of the money owed them for their work.[10][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 now been published in Psychological Science in its January 2008 issue,[12] with McKinstry as posthumous first author.

McKinstry is the subject of a 2010 documentary called The Man Behind the Curtain which recounts his innovative work and his mental battles.[13]

Internet suicide

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, Montblanc commercial universe is not for me. If only I was loved as much a Montblanc pen..." (In the actual note,[14] McKinstry seems to have deliberately misspelled all three brand names and left out a noun for them to modify: "This Luis Vuitton, Parada, Mont Blanc is not for me. If only I was loved as much a 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."[15]

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 little over a month later. Both of their AI projects, McKinstry's Mindpixel project and Singh's MIT-backed Open Mind Common Sense, had similar trajectories over the last six years.[16] 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[17] regarding their similar projects. Both were heterodox AI researchers who were pursuing closely themed endeavours and beta software projects.[note 1]

Articles
  • "Minimum Intelligent Signal Test: An Alternative Turing Test", Canadian Artificial Intelligence, No.41.[20]
  • "A Closer Look at Life in the Summer of '76", Mindjack, 2001.
  • "Passage through science", Mindjack, 2001.
  • "Twenty Twenty: Astronomical Vision", Mindjack, 2002.
  • "A Hacker Goes to Iraq", 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, 2003.[21]
  • Epstein, Robert; Roberts, Gary; Beber, Grace, eds. (1 December 2008). "Mind as Space". Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 283. ISBN 978-1-4020-9624-2.
  • McKinstry, Chris; Dale, Rick; Spivey, Michael J. (January 1, 2008). "Action dynamics reveal parallel competition in decision making". Psychological Science. 19 (1): 22–24. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02041.x. PMID 18181787.

Notes
  1. For comparisons of McKinstry and Singh, see[1][2][3] and the 2008 story published in Wired.[18] Similarly, Luis von Ahn (McArthur Genius Award winner) also mentions both McKinstry and Singh in his Carnegie Mellon 2005 dissertation on Human Computation.[19]

References
  1. Mottram, Bob (January 28, 2006). "Legends in AI: Chris McKinstry". The Streeb-Greebling Diaries. Archived from the original on February 14, 2006. Retrieved June 10, 2018.
  2. Hendler, James. "In Memoriam: Push Singh (1972-2006)". KurzweilAI.net. Archived from the original on November 16, 2007. Retrieved January 14, 2007.
  3. "Mindpixel Crashes". AlphabetSoup. May 6, 2006. Archived from the original on July 5, 2006. Retrieved June 6, 2006.
  4. "McKinstry in Toronto - Globe and Mail". Google Groups. Retrieved June 10, 2018.
  5. "McKinstry in Toronto - Toronto Star". Google Groups. Retrieved June 10, 2018.
  6. "Google Groups". Google Groups. Archived from the original on December 2, 2002. Retrieved June 10, 2018.
  7. Barger, Jorn (July 2002). "Chris McKinstry: master hoaxster?". Robot Wisdom. Archived from the original on March 1, 2005. Retrieved June 10, 2018.
  8. McKinstry, Christopher (July 9, 2002). "Birth of Scientific AI". Google Groups. Retrieved June 10, 2018.
  9. "Life on a beach". Google Groups. December 26, 1999. Retrieved June 10, 2018.
  10. "What ever happend to CR6 (Winnipeg Internet Soap)". Google Groups. September 12, 1999. Retrieved June 10, 2018.
  11. "What ever happend to CR6 (Winnipeg Internet Soap)". Google Groups. Retrieved June 10, 2018.
  12. McKinstry, Chris; Dale, Rick; Spivey, Michael J. (January 1, 2008). "Action dynamics reveal parallel competition in decision making". Psychological Science. 19 (1): 22–24. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02041.x. PMID 18181787.
  13. "Home". The Man Behind The Curtain. Archived from the original on March 17, 2009. Retrieved June 10, 2018.
  14. "So what does a web suicide note look like?". Wired. Retrieved June 10, 2018.
  15. "Suicide Announced on His Blog; Three Days Later He Was Found Dead". Dashslot.co.uk. Archived from the original on July 15, 2006. Retrieved June 10, 2018.
  16. Manjoo, Farhad (September 15, 2000). "Two Fake Brains Better Than One". Wired. Archived from the original on May 28, 2006. Retrieved June 10, 2018.
  17. "author:push@mit.edu". Google Groups. Retrieved June 10, 2018.
  18. Kushner, David (January 18, 2008). "Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened?". Wired. Retrieved June 10, 2018.
  19. von Ahn, Luis (December 7, 2005). Human Computation (PDF) (Ph.D). Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science. p. 67. Retrieved June 10, 2018.
  20. McKinstry, Chris. "Minimum Intelligent Signal Test: An Alternative Turing Test". Canadian Artificial Intelligence (41). Retrieved June 10, 2018.
  21. McKinstry, Chris (Spring 2003). "A Hacker Goes to Iraq" (PDF). 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. 20 (1): 9. Archived from the original (PDF) on February 3, 2006. Retrieved June 10, 2018.
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