“The Eye of a Robot: Studies in Machine Vision at MIT” and “TX-O Computer” (1959)

The first of two films shown here, “Eye of a Robot” (to 18:30) summarizes computer vision research being carried out in the 1950s at the MIT Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence, under the direction of Marvin Minsky and with Patrick Winston and Berthold Horn supervising the robotics work. The film shows how “experimental computer programs extract line drawings from pictures and use knowledge about the three-dimensional world, and also how new ideas about artificial intelligence are used in these processes.” The second film is silent and shows the TX-O computer at work, e.g on a tic-tac-toe game. Courtesy of MIT Museum.