1. Life

2. Internet suicide

3. Comparisons with Push Singh

4. Articles

5. Notes

6. References

7. External links

Life

McKinstry was a Canadian citizen. Born in Winnipeg, he resided several years in Chile. Since 1999, he lived in Antofagasta as a VLT operator for the European Southern Observatory. At the end of 2004, he moved back to Santiago, Chile. Suffering from bipolar disorder, McKinstry had an armed standoff with police in Toronto in 1990.^[4][5]

He was known on the Internet for discussing his drug use^[6] and making extravagant claims about his technology.^[7][8] He claimed that he became a millionaire at the age of 17 from inventing a copy protection scheme "marketed under the names oxylok, prolock, and mediaguard",^[9] however, this claim has never been verified.

In 1997, Chris McKinstry started an online soap opera, CR6. Like many other dot-coms, the start-up failed after several months. McKinstry claimed to have lost $1 million in the CR6 failure, and the many people he recruited to build the soap opera, including photographers, writers, a director, and several prominent businesses, never received any of the money owed them for their work.^[10][11]

Before his death McKinstry designed an experiment with two cognitive scientists to study the dynamics of thought processes using data from his Mindpixel project. This work has now been published in Psychological Science in its January 2008 issue,^[12] with McKinstry as posthumous first author.

McKinstry is the subject of a 2010 documentary called The Man Behind the Curtain which recounts his innovative work and his mental battles.^[13]

Internet suicide

On January 20, 2006, two postings appeared on McKinstry's weblog. In one, entitled "Very Serious Thoughts on Suicide", he said, "Why am I writing this? Just as a matter of record, to prove I was here and ahead of all of you. Time to go," and then quoted a dozen aphorisms about suicide, such as "Suicide is man's way of telling God, 'You can't fire me — I quit.'" (attributed to Bill Maher).

The other posting, entitled "So what exactly does a web suicide note look like?", was a suicide note. Chris wrote, "I am tired of feeling the same feelings and experiencing the same experiences. It is time to move on and see what is next if anything." The suicide posting ended, "This Louis Vuitton, Prada, Montblanc commercial universe is not for me. If only I was loved as much a Montblanc pen..." (In the actual note,^[14] McKinstry seems to have deliberately misspelled all three brand names and left out a noun for them to modify: "This Luis Vuitton, Parada, Mont Blanc is not for me. If only I was loved as much a pen...")

Chris McKinstry was found dead in his apartment on January 23, 2006 with a plastic bag over his head and "a hose that was connected to the gas pipe."^[15]

Comparisons with Push Singh

There has been some public note of the similarity between the suicide of Chris McKinstry and that of Push Singh, another AI researcher, a little over a month later. Both of their AI projects, McKinstry's Mindpixel project and Singh's MIT-backed Open Mind Common Sense, had similar trajectories over the last six years.^[16] Both McKinstry and Singh were Canadians at some point (although Singh was born in India) of approximately the same age who had been in contact over the years in the same AI communities^[17] regarding their similar projects. Both were heterodox AI researchers who were pursuing closely themed endeavours and beta software projects.{{refn|group=note|name=comparisons|For comparisons of McKinstry and Singh, see^[1][2][3] and the 2008 story published in Wired.^[18] Similarly, Luis von Ahn (McArthur Genius Award winner) also mentions both McKinstry and Singh in his Carnegie Mellon 2005 dissertation on Human Computation.^[19]}}

Articles

• "Minimum Intelligent Signal Test: An Alternative Turing Test", Canadian Artificial Intelligence, No.41.^[20]
• "A Closer Look at Life in the Summer of '76", Mindjack, 2001.
• "Passage through science", Mindjack, 2001.
• "Twenty Twenty: Astronomical Vision", Mindjack, 2002.
• "A Hacker Goes to Iraq", 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, 2003.^[21]
• {{cite book |chapter=Mind as Space |editor-last1=Epstein |editor-first1=Robert |editor-last2=Roberts |editor-first2=Gary |editor-last3=Beber |editor-first3=Grace |title=Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer |chapterurl=https://books.google.com/books?id=AcXFfl1pPcgC&pg=PA283&dq=chris+mckinstry&hl=en&ei=34ndTKq6GsyxhAfBqKHGDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&sqi=2&ved=0CDwQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=chris%20mckinstry&f=false |date=1 December 2008 |publisher=Springer Science & Business Media |isbn=978-1-4020-9624-2 |page=283}}
• {{cite journal |last1=McKinstry |first1=Chris |last2=Dale |first2=Rick |last3=Spivey |first3=Michael J. |title=Action dynamics reveal parallel competition in decision making |date=January 1, 2008 |journal=Psychological Science |volume=19 |issue=1 |pages=22–24|doi=10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02041.x |pmid = 18181787}}

Notes

References

External links

• {{cite web |url=http://www.oocities.org/gactheripper/MIndPixelPageFront.html |title=MindPixel: Is It Real? |date=October 2009 |website=oocities.org |access-date=June 10, 2018}}
• {{cite web |url=http://mindpixel.com |title=Mindpixel Digital Mind Modeling Project |date=2000 |website=Mindpixel |access-date=June 10, 2018 |dead-url=yes |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20000815061020/http://www.mindpixel.com/ |archive-date=August 15, 2000 |df=mdy-all }}
• {{cite web |url=https://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20000824.html |title= Put On Your Thinking Cap: Chris McKinstry Wants to Build a Brain Accelerator |last=Cringely |first=Robert X. |authorlink=Robert X. Cringely |date=August 24, 2000 |website=PBS |access-date=June 10, 2018 |dead-url=yes |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20001206114300/https://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20000824.html |archive-date=December 6, 2000}}
• {{cite web |url=http://www.cr6.com/ |title=CR6 online soap opera |website=cr6.com |access-date=June 10, 2018 |dead-url=yes |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/19970412125441/http://www.cr6.com/ |archive-date=April 12, 1997}}

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