Big things, faraway things, crazy or obscure or commercially unpromising things that you need a PhD to even think about - that's what people do at 200 Technology Square. A drab concrete office block in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Tech Square has been one of the centers of the computer universe for more than 40 years. Energy-aware lossless data compression? Amorphous and cellular computing? Biomechatronics? If any of that would keep you up until 3:30 in the morning, eyes wired to a monitor while shoveling down yesterday's cold Chinese food, right in. Tech Square, formally the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Building NE43, is home to CSAIL, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. It's a fluorescent-lit playpen stuffed with 600 in-progress or full PhDs and a thousand quirks. The pretty face of MIT - the iconic dome and quad on the bank of the Charles River, facing Boston - is a 10-minute walk away. This place is MIT's scuzzy port on the postindustrial motherboard of eastern Cambridge. But inside are the tribal artifacts of intelligence at work: nine floors of networking cable and computers piled in sedimentary layers, couches bowed and stained by napping geeks, hallway whiteboards covered in arcana, and vintage machines chugging away in the homegrown programming favorite Lisp.
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