Looking for items to populate my new constraints resources site, I delved into the MIT CSAIL video archive for some footage I knew was there showcasing the early work of Dave Waltz on scene labeling, which used his seminal arc consistency algorithm. Check out this video; the scene labeling starts around the 7:15 mark.

If you’re wondering why it is “eye of a robot” and not “eyes”, our “robot” at the time was a Cyclops. There was one huge camera, and another, separate, enormous arm. The story goes that the arm came loose from its moorings one day and backed Gerry Sussman into a corner. The eye and hand together were used for the pioneering MIT Copy Demo project.  

I shared an office in the old MIT AI Lab for a while with Dave Waltz. He describes some of that time here. If you like reading about “history”, there is more historical material in Constraint Satisfaction: An Emerging Paradigm from the Handbook of Constraint Programming, in “The Complexity of Constraint Satisfaction Revisited“, in a series of articles on Papers with Impact, and in the “commentaries” contained in a  “virtual volume” celebrating the first 25 years of the CP conference.

Perhaps readers can share historical anecdotes in the comments.