Ray Solomonoff - Life History Through 1964

Life History Through 1964

Ray Solomonoff was born on July 25, 1926, in Cleveland, Ohio, son of the Russian immigrants Phillip Julius and Sarah Mashman Solomonoff. He attended Glenville High School, graduating in 1944. In 1944 he joined the United States Navy as Instructor in Electronics. From 1947-1951 he attended the University of Chicago, studying under Professors such as Rudolf Carnap and Enrico Fermi, and graduated with an M.S. in Physics in 1951.

From his earliest years he was motivated by the pure joy of mathematical discovery and by the desire to explore where no one had gone before. At age of 16, in 1942, he began to search for a general method to solve mathematical problems.

In 1952 he met Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy and others interested in machine intelligence. In 1956 Minsky and McCarthy and others organized the Dartmouth Summer Research Conference on Artificial Intelligence, where Ray was one of the original 10 participants --- he and Minsky were the only ones to stay all summer. It was for this group that Artificial Intelligence was first named as a science. Computers at the time could solve very specific mathematical problems, but not much else. Ray wanted to pursue a bigger question, how to make machines more generally intelligent, and how computers could use probability for this purpose.