Michael Mauldin

Founder of Lycos

• Born: March 23, 1959
• Place of Birth: Dallas, Texas

Primary Company/Organization: Lycos

Introduction

In 1994, Michael Mauldin created the Internet search engine Lycos with three pages of code. A year later, the venture capital company CMGI purchased the program and built it into a publicly traded company. Mauldin went on to cofound Conversive (formerly Virtual Personalities, Inc.) in 1997, which creates computer-generated human characters. In 2000, his obsession with robots was initiated by an episode of the television show Battle Bots, and robotics have fascinated him since.

Early Life

Michael Loren “Fuzzy” Mauldin was born on March 23, 1959, in Dallas, Texas. He attended Rice University, with a double major in computer science and mathematics and a minor in linguistics. While at Rice, he was introduced to ELIZA, an early chatterbot developed in 1966, and became fascinated by it, leading to his interest in linguistics as he sought a better understanding of language and natural language processing. Mauldin went to graduate school at Carnegie Mellon, where he was earned a master's degree in 1983 and a Ph.D. in 1989, both in computer science. Jaime Carbonell, whose work has encompassed artificial intelligence, information retrieval, and machine learning, was the chair of his dissertation committee and adviser.

After graduation, Mauldin worked as a research associate at Carnegie Mellon from 1989 to 1991 and as a research computer scientist in the university's Center for Machine Translation from 1991 to 1995, after which he founded Lycos, Inc., spinning off a Carnegie Mellon research project.

Life's Work

Mauldin's work in the computing industry has covered a variety of areas and has left a lasting influence. In 1984, he was one of three programmers who developed Rog-O-Matic, which they described as “a belligerent expert system [in the artificial intelligence sense].” It was a bot programmed to play the dungeon crawling computer game Rogue, an exceptionally popular Unix game in the 1980s. Because Rogue was a text adventure (like the better-known Zork, for instance), its output could be piped to Rog-O-Matic, which could therefore easily be given the same information a human player would have. The bot was designed to respond to a dynamic environment in a way that artificial intelligence theorists continue to study and cite.

After Rog-O-Matic, Mauldin created Gloria, a bot built to play TinyMUD, an online text adventure environment launched in 1989. Gloria was succeeded by Julia, which gradually developed greater conversational skills as a result of interacting in the game, as well as the ability to play the card game Hearts.

Mauldin coined the term chatterbot to describe other bots that, instead of playing games, were programmed to simulate conversation with human users. The first such was ELIZA, introduced in 1966 in response to Alan Turing's 1950 article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” which proposed a conversation-based test of artificial intelligence. More recent chatterbots have been used online for commercial purposes—sometimes as spam, sometimes to automate customer assistance (a fictional chatterbot named JARVIS was even featured in the Iron Man movies). The design and implementation of chatterbots has been an important area of artificial intelligence and specifically of developing the subfield of natural language processing. The annual Loebner Prize is awarded to chatterbots considered the most convincing; in 1991, Julia came in third. Mauldin continued to work on her regularly, deploying her into chat environments as well as various multiuser dungeons (MUDs) and other online games.

Eventually the Julia work led to collaboration with clinical psychologist and animator Peter Plantec, and Mauldin and Plantec founded Virtual Personalities, Inc., which became Conversive. Conversive develops verbally enhanced software robots, or verbots—chatterbots with animation and speech that convey more information and personality than text alone can do. The first verbot was Sylvie, which took Mauldin's Julia work and went further, offering more flexible interfacing, a voice, and an animated face.

Mauldin's chatterbot work led directly to his best-known accomplishment, the Lycos search engine, named for the wolf spider, Lycosidae lycosa. Julia explored virtual game worlds defined by text descriptions and, in order to navigate the dungeons and other areas of these games, needed to be able to map the paths through them. Lycos, in turn, explored the World Wide Web, with its hyperlinks and pages of text, learning information about its contents just as Julia learned about the dungeons.

Mauldin was working at Carnegie Mellon's Informedia Digital Library when he developed Lycos. Mauldin was the principal investigator in charge of natural language, indexing, and retrieval. Informedia is a research program developed by the university to carry out research in information visualization, information retrieval, face recognition, search engines, and other issues related to intelligently sifting through large bodies of data. It was begun in preparation for the large amounts of information expected to become available as a result of the Internet, the popularity of personal computers, and the growing digitization of data previously available only in hard copy.

The amount of information available on the Internet even in its early days made search engines increasingly necessary. Archie, the first Internet search tool, had been introduced in 1990 for searching the directory listings of public anonymous file transfer protocol (FTP) sites. Unlike later search tools, it did not create indices of contents, so every time a search was performed, it had to go through the whole process again. Veronica and Jughead were created a year later to search gopher servers, and in 1993 a primitive search of the web was available in the form of W3Catalog, which was indexed by compiling numerous catalogs that had been assembled by hand. The first web robots followed. Web robots, web crawlers, or spiders are programs that automatically browse the web, beginning with specified sites called seeds, followed by the sites linked from those sites, then the sites linked from those sites, and so on. While crawling the web, a web crawler maps what it finds and in some cases downloads some of the web pages it accesses for faster later retrieval. The first search engine to resemble modern web search engines was WebCrawler, which allowed users to search the full text of web pages for any string.

Lycos was developed the same year as WebCrawler, released in 1994, and became the first search engine to be commercialized. Lycos, Inc., was spun off from Informedia, with Mauldin as its founder and chief scientist. Mauldin later downplayed the accomplishment—the search engine was written in three pages of code, using principles of information retrieval that had already been developed, and simply applied those principles to the web. He was savvy in commercializing the product, delegating the proper tasks to lawyers and accountants. Mauldin owned half of the intellectual property and Carnegie Mellon the other half (which translated into each owning 10 percent of the company after it went public). Mark Coticchia, the director of the CMU Technology Transfer office, functioned as the business manager. The company's initial public offering followed in 1996, opening at $16 per share with 3 million shares. Lycos was one of the first Internet companies to go public, preceding the flurry of initial public offerings (IPOs) that led to the Internet bubble at the end of the decade.

Mauldin left Lycos in 1997, when Virtual Personalities (Conversive) was formed. He has pointed out that his knowledge of search engines quickly became dated and that he never learned Java, as his interests went in different directions.

Mauldin has been granted five patents, two related to the Informedia Digital Library, two related to Lycos, and one in his virtual personalities work. A tattoo on his arm displays the Lycos spider, along with its patent number. He retired in 2006 and settled in Texas, although he remained on the board at Conversive, which was eventually acquired by Avaya. In 2022, he founded Maudlin Editorial Consulting, where he worked as a freelance writer and editor.

Personal Life

Mauldin is a fan of the Robot Fighting League (established in 2002), which promotes robotic sports and competitions, and he is an active competitor in it. He is a former vice president of Robot Club and Grille, a robot-themed restaurant that hosted robot fighting events. He competed on the Comedy Central program BattleBots from 2000 to 2002, and his robot Icecube won the middleweight division of the Robot Fighting League national championship in 2006.

Mauldin and his wife, Debbie, have two sons, Gregory Bernard and Daniel Baird. He is also a licensed pilot.

Bibliography

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Mauldin, Michael, G. Jacobson, A. Appel, and L. Hamey. “ROG-O-MATIC: A Belligerent Expert System.” 16 May 1984. Carnegie Mellon University Department of Computer Science. Web. 12 Aug. 2012.

Plantec, Peter. Virtual Humans: A Build-It-Yourself Kit, Complete with Software and Step by Step Instructions; Creating the Illusion of Personality. New York: AMACOM, 2004. Print.

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