Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [30]
Marciano, who later studied computer science and went on to become a finance professor at New York University’s Stern Business School, met Ferrucci later that afternoon. The two of them stayed long into the evening, paging through a single manual, trying out programs on the computer and getting the machine to spit out differential equations. At that point, Ferrucci knew that he wanted to work with computers. However, he didn’t consider it a stand-alone career. A computer was a tool, as he saw it, not a destination. Anyway, he was going to be a doctor.
He went on to Manhattan College, a small Catholic school that was actually in The Bronx, a few miles north of Manhattan. There he followed the pre-med track as a biology major and took computer science on the side. “I did a bunch of programming for the physiology lab,” he said. “Everything I did in biology I kept relating to computers.” The way technology was advancing, it seemed, there had to be a place for computers in medicine.
One night, Ferrucci was taking a practice exam in a course for the MCATs, the Medical College Admission Tests. “I was with all my pre-med friends,” he said. “This is midway through the course. The proctor says, ‘Open to page 10 and start taking the sample chemistry test.’ I opened it up and I started doing the questions, and all of a sudden I said, ‘You know what? I’m not going to be a doctor!’ And I closed the test and I went up to the proctor and I said, ‘I’m quitting. I don’t want to be a doctor.’ He said, ‘You’re not going to get your $500 back.’ I said, ‘Whatever.’”
Ferrucci left the building and made two phone calls. He dialed the easier one first, telling his girlfriend that he’d just walked out of the MCAT class and was giving up on medicine. Then he called his father. “That was a hard call to make,” Ferrucci said. “He was very upset in the beginning.”
His MCAT insight, while steering him away from medicine, didn’t put him on another clear path. He still didn’t know what to do. “I started looking for graduate programs in physiology that had a strong computing component,” he said. “After about a week or two of that, I suddenly said, ‘Wait a minute.’” He called this his “second-level epiphany.” He asked himself why he was avoiding the obvious. “I was really interested in the computer stuff,” he said, “not the physiology. So I’d have to make a complete break.” He applied to graduate school in computer science and went upstate, to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), in Troy, New York.
In his first stint at IBM Research, between getting his master’s and his doctorate at RPI, Ferrucci delved into AI. By that time, in the late ’80s, the industry had split into two factions. While some scientists still pursued the initial goal of thinking machines, or general intelligence, others looked for more focused applications that could handle real jobs (and justify the research). The king of “narrow AI,” and Ferrucci’s focus, was the expert system. The idea was to develop smart software for a specific industry. A program designed, say, for the travel industry could answer questions about Disneyland or Paris, find cheap flights, and book hotels. These specialists wouldn’t have to puzzle out the context of people’s conversations. The focus of their domains would make it clear. For that electronic expert in travel, for example, “room” would mean only one thing. The computer wouldn’t have to concern itself with “room” in the backseat of a Cadillac or “room” to explore in the undergraduate curriculum at Bryn Mawr. If it were asked about such things, it would draw a blank. Computers that lacked range and flexibility were known as brittle. The one-trick ponies seen as expert systems almost defined the term. Many in the industry didn’t consider them AI at all. They certainly didn’t think or act like people.
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