Kenneth Christopher "Chris" McKinstry (February 12, 1967 – January 23, 2006) was a Canadian artificial intelligence researcher. He was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and died in Santiago, Chile. McKinstry led the development of the MISTIC project, which was launched in May 1996. He founded the Mindpixel project in July 2000 and closed it in December 2005. McKinstry's AI work and similar early death dovetailed with another contemporary AI researcher, Push Singh, and his MIT Open Mind Common Sense Project.^[21,22,3]

McKinstry was a Canadian citizen who was born in Winnipeg and resided for several years in Chile. Suffering from bipolar disorder, McKinstry had an armed standoff lasting 7 1/2 hours with police in Toronto in 1990, which ultimately concluded with him being hit with tear gas, but ended with no casualties.^[23]

In February 1997, Chris McKinstry started an online soap opera, CR6 (Clickable Reality 6).^[10] According to journalist Bartley Kives, around 700 people auditioned for the show, which only lasted for two months, before McKinstry left Winnipeg with "estimated debts in excess of $100,000".^[12] McKinstry later 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 to them for their work.

From 1999, he lived in Antofagasta as a VLT operator for the European Southern Observatory, and at the end of 2004, he moved back to Santiago, Chile. 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 was later published in Psychological Science in its January 2008 issue, with McKinstry as posthumous first author.^[25]

Chris McKinstry had a long struggle with his mental health, admitting to being diagnosed with bipolar disorder.^[26] As a result, he suffered from frequent suicidal thoughts and a long-standing depression, which he discussed in his suicide note. In his teen years, McKinstry had attempted suicide by intentionally overdosing on drugs, another issue he struggled with.^[27] His bipolar disorder is often attributed to the reason for his standoff in 1990.

Chris McKinstry was found dead in his apartment on January 23, 2006, with a plastic bag over his head, connected to the stove gas line with a hose.^[28] He was found to have posted a suicide note online, writing: "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...This Louis Vuitton, Prada, Montblanc commercial universe is not for me. If only I was loved as much a Montblanc pen..."^[14]

There was 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.^[27]

McKinstry published "Minimum Intelligent Signal Test: An Alternative Turing Test" in Canadian Artificial Intelligence, No. 41. For Mindjack, he wrote "A Closer Look at Life in the Summer of '76" and "Passage through science" in 2001, followed by "Twenty Twenty: Astronomical Vision" in 2002. In 2003, his article "A Hacker Goes to Iraq" was published in 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. His writings further include Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer, published by Springer Science & Business Media on December 1, 2008. Additionally, Chris McKinstry, Rick Dale, and Michael J. Spivey co-authored "Action dynamics reveal parallel competition in decision making", published in Psychological Science on January 1, 2008.

External links include "MindPixel: Is It Real?" from October 2009 and the "Mindpixel Digital Mind Modeling Project" from 2000. Additional links include Robert X. Cringely's "Put On Your Thinking Cap: Chris McKinstry Wants to Build a Brain Accelerator" from August 24, 2000, and the CR6 online soap opera. Also included is Luis von Ahn's "Human Computation" from the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science, dated December 7, 2005.