Danny Hillis, in full William Daniel Hillis, Jr., an American, is the son of a U.S. Air Force epidemiologist. Hillis spent his early years traveling abroad with his family and being homeschooled. He developed an interest in biology, while his mother nurtured his interest in mathematics. Hillis, at the age of nine, built his first “computer” out of a phonograph player; he later built a tic-tac-toe-playing computer out of Tinkertoys. The Hillis family returned to Baltimore in 1968 so that Daniel might attend school. In 1974 Hillis enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study neurophysiology. Soon he found his way to the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he met the pioneering artificial intelligence theorist Marvin Minsky. At Minsky’s laboratory Hillis and coworkers developed a graphical user interface for the Logo computer programming language for children. Meanwhile, Hillis learned that Minsky was building a computer, so he read the design plans and studied the machine. Minsky was so impressed by Hillis’s suggested improvements that he took Hillis on as a student and provided him with a room in his home. Meanwhile, Hillis changed his major to mathematics and then computer science . While working at Minsky’s laboratory, Hillis pioneered a new approach to computing. He wanted to make a computer that might aid in understanding human cognition. He found ordinary computers, which operate sequentially, to be unwieldy instruments for studying the brain. Hillis imagined that human thought arises from the operations of millions of neurons interacting and working on problems in diverse ways—in computer parlance, massively parallel processing. Although Seymour Cray had built the Cray X-MP in 1982 by linking together two Cray-1 supercomputers, they were massively in efficient. Hillis set about to challenge that idea by building a machine composed of thousands of simple processors programmed to work and interact together. The concept soon became a business as well as a research topic.
In 1983, with Minsky’s encouragement, Hillis founded Thinking Machines Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its first product was the Connection Machine, and its first customer the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The Connection Machine used commercially available processors connected together to perform operations in parallel. In 1985 the first 65,536-processor Connection Machine was completed; it was comparable in computational power to the world’s fastest supercomputer, the Cray-2, but vastly cheaper to build. In 1985 Hillis published his doctoral dissertation as The Connection Machine, and in 1988 he earned his Ph.D.
In 1994 Thinking Machines filed for bankruptcy, and Hillis returned to MIT as an adjunct professor. He started his own consulting company. In 1996 Hillis became the vice president of research and development at the Walt Disney Company’s Imagineering Department. More recently, Hillis co-founded Applied Minds and Applied Invention, an interdisciplinary group of engineers, scientists, and artists.