Kirsch co-authored - with an undergraduate intern! - one of the foundational papers of my field of cheminformatics. Then never touched the topic again, as he was more interested in computers and art.
He worked on the SEAC computer at the National Bureau of Standards. Quoting the Wikipedia page (which in turn cites Kirsch), SEAC "is claimed to be the first fully operational stored-program electronic computer in the US".
The NBS had this great little machine - the first computer available to the US government, at least for general use - and it got applied to all sorts of projects.
Marvin Minsky, for example, learned to program on it, https://www.webofstories.com/play/marvin.minsky/29 , where they tried to get the computer to recognize letters. (Minsky commented "my friend Russell Kirsch ... was the kind of person who could say well, everybody's having their machines crunching numbers, can we have one that can recognize patterns.")
The SEAC team talked with the US Patent office, which had a thorny problem of how to handle chemical patents. They needed some way to search chemical structures by substructure. Ray (the intern) and Kirsch implemented subgraph isomorphism search on the SEAC, in 1956, published the following year, and still often cited (though less often read).
> 21:09: This solved the immediate problem for the Patent Office, although in a very ponderous way. An amusing incident is this: The program that we wrote demonstrated this possibility, but it was so ponderous - so slow - that we decided 'gee, I hope we don't have to use our program in the Patent Office'.
> 21:29: Well in those days, a tool that you hoped you wouldn't have to use was the hydrogen bomb. So we decided to call our program the H-BOMB code. When the coding sheets got misplaced, the FBI came in, and it took an awful lot of explanation to explain this was just a name; it had nothing to do with the hydrogen bomb.
> The staff of the NBS computing lab declared us “Heroes of the SEAC”, a title awarded in those days to programmers whose programs ran on the first try—a rare event—and for some while we had to go around wearing our “medals,” which were drawn freehand in crayon on the back of used teletype paper. (The word “hero” was in parody of the practice in the Soviet Union of declaring persons “Heroes of the Soviet Union” for this and that accomplishment.)
I wrote a letter to him a few years ago, to ask questions about his chemical substructure work. His wife, Joan Kirsch, kindly replied and said his dementia was too far progressed. My heart goes out to her and her family.
He worked on the SEAC computer at the National Bureau of Standards. Quoting the Wikipedia page (which in turn cites Kirsch), SEAC "is claimed to be the first fully operational stored-program electronic computer in the US".
The NBS had this great little machine - the first computer available to the US government, at least for general use - and it got applied to all sorts of projects.
Marvin Minsky, for example, learned to program on it, https://www.webofstories.com/play/marvin.minsky/29 , where they tried to get the computer to recognize letters. (Minsky commented "my friend Russell Kirsch ... was the kind of person who could say well, everybody's having their machines crunching numbers, can we have one that can recognize patterns.")
The SEAC team talked with the US Patent office, which had a thorny problem of how to handle chemical patents. They needed some way to search chemical structures by substructure. Ray (the intern) and Kirsch implemented subgraph isomorphism search on the SEAC, in 1956, published the following year, and still often cited (though less often read).
Kirsch humorously points out in the video at http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/birth-of-the-compu... ,
> 21:09: This solved the immediate problem for the Patent Office, although in a very ponderous way. An amusing incident is this: The program that we wrote demonstrated this possibility, but it was so ponderous - so slow - that we decided 'gee, I hope we don't have to use our program in the Patent Office'.
> 21:29: Well in those days, a tool that you hoped you wouldn't have to use was the hydrogen bomb. So we decided to call our program the H-BOMB code. When the coding sheets got misplaced, the FBI came in, and it took an awful lot of explanation to explain this was just a name; it had nothing to do with the hydrogen bomb.
As another example of the humor they had, see http://www.ams.org/journals/notices/200711/tx071101502p.pdf where:
> The staff of the NBS computing lab declared us “Heroes of the SEAC”, a title awarded in those days to programmers whose programs ran on the first try—a rare event—and for some while we had to go around wearing our “medals,” which were drawn freehand in crayon on the back of used teletype paper. (The word “hero” was in parody of the practice in the Soviet Union of declaring persons “Heroes of the Soviet Union” for this and that accomplishment.)
For more about the machine, see https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2010/06/pioneer-nist-c... .
I wrote a letter to him a few years ago, to ask questions about his chemical substructure work. His wife, Joan Kirsch, kindly replied and said his dementia was too far progressed. My heart goes out to her and her family.