Controversial artificial intelligence researcher and maverick cognitive science visionary Chris McKinstry took his own life last month.
Chris founded Mindpixel, a collaborative AI project which aimed to collate a mass of machine-usable human knowledge online. He also ran the now offline Mindpixel blog, where he posted AI news and opinions.
His ideas were often highly speculative, but always demonstrated a keen passion for understanding the mind and brain. A recent story for kuro5hin.org was an example of this, where he discussed his entry for the AI chatbot competition the Loebner Prize in terms of a seven dimensional hyper-surface.
Chris posted his intentions to end his life online, and, cognitive scientist to the end, finished it thus:
Oh and BTW, the mind is a maximum hypersurface and thought a trajectory on it and the amygdala and hippocampus are Hopf maps of it. No one knew this before me, and it seems no one cares. So be it. My time will come in a hundred or a thousand years when the idea again returns.
Link to Wikipedia entry for Chris McKinstry.
Link to obituary from KBand.
Mind Hacks 