Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky , sometimes affectionately known as "Old Man Minsky", is an
American cognitive scientist in the field of
artificial intelligence , co-founder of
MIT's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and
philosophy.
Quotations
..We rarely recognize how wonderful it is that a person can traverse an entire lifetime without making a single really serious mistake -- like putting a fork in one's eye or using a window instead of a door.
The Society of Mind
More Quotes >>
Encyclopedia
Marvin Lee Minsky , sometimes affectionately known as "Old Man Minsky", is an
American cognitive scientist in the field of
artificial intelligence , co-founder of
MIT's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and
philosophy.
Biography
Marvin Minsky was born in
New York City, where he attended
The Fieldston School and the
Bronx High School of Science. He later attended
Phillips Academy in
Andover, Massachusetts. He served in the
US Navy from 1944 to 1945. He holds a BA in Mathematics from
Harvard and a PhD in the same field from
Princeton . He has been on the MIT faculty since 1958. He is currently Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Professor of
electrical engineering and computer science.
Minsky won the Turing Award in 1969, the Japan Prize in 1990, the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence in 1991, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the
Franklin Institute in 2001.
Minsky's
patents include the first head-mounted graphical display and the confocal scanning microscope . He developed with
Seymour Papert the first
Logo "turtle". Minsky also built, in 1951, the first randomly wired neural network learning machine, SNARC.
Minsky wrote the book
Perceptrons , which became the foundational work in the analysis of
artificial neural networks. Its criticism of unrigorous research in the field has been claimed as being responsible for the virtual disappearance of artificial neural networks from academic research in the 1970s.
[Edit]: So it was claimed--but actually our mathematical analysis was to show why bigger perceptrons didn't get better at solving hard problems. And contrary to a popular rumor, almost all our theorems still apply to multilayer
feedforward neural networks. But curiously, no one seems to have proved this, and Papert and I went on to other subjects . -- Marvin Minsky
Minsky was an adviser on the movie and is referred to in the movie and book.
- "Probably no one would ever know this; it did not matter. In the 1980s, Minsky and Good had shown how neural networks could be generated automatically—self replicated—-in accordance with any arbitrary learning program. Artificial brains could be grown by a process strikingly analogous to the development of a human brain. In any given case, the precise details would never be known, and even if they were, they would be millions of times too complex for human understanding."
Minsky was almost killed due to an accident on the set.
In the early 1970s at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, Minsky and Seymour Papert started developing what came to be called The Society of Mind theory. The theory attempts to explain how what we call intelligence could be a product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. Minsky says that the biggest source of ideas about the theory came from his work in trying to create a machine that uses a robotic arm, a video camera, and a computer to build with children's blocks. In 1986 Minsky published a comprehensive book on the theory which, unlike most of his previously published work, was written for a general audience.
Minsky is an actor in an artificial intelligence koan from the Jargon file:
- In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
- "What are you doing?" asked Minsky.
- "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe," Sussman replied.
- "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
- "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play," Sussman said.
- Minsky then shut his eyes.
- "Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher.
- "So that the room will be empty."
- At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
[Edit]: What I actually said was, "If you wire it randomly, it will still have preconceptions of how to play. But you just won't know what those preconceptions are." -- Marvin Minsky
Affiliations
Marvin Minsky is affiliated with the following organizations:
Minsky is also a co-sponsor of the Loebner Prize.
Trivia
Minsky is a childhood friend of the
Yale University critic
Harold Bloom, who has referred to him as "the sinister Marvin Minsky."
Isaac Asimov has described Minsky as one of two people he has ever met smarter than himself; the other is
Carl SaganSelected works
- Neural Nets and the Brain Model Problem, Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1954. The first publication of theories and theorems about learning in neural networks, secondary reinforcement, circulating dynamic storage and synaptic modifications.
- Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines, Prentice-Hall, 1967. A standard text in computer science. Out of print now, but soon to reappear.
- Semantic Information Processing, MIT Press, 1968. This collection had a strong influence on modern computational linguistics.
- Perceptrons, with Seymour Papert, MIT Press, 1969 .
- Artificial Intelligence, with Seymour Papert, Univ. of Oregon Press, 1972. Out of print.
- , 1985
- Robotics, Doubleday, 1986. Edited collection of essays about robotics, with Introduction and Postscript by Minsky.
- The Society of Mind, Simon and Schuster, 1987. The first comprehensive description of the Society of Mind theory of intellectual structure and development. See also The Society of Mind , Voyager, 1996.
- The Turing Option, with Harry Harrison, Warner Books, New York, 1992. Science fiction thriller about the construction of a superintelligent robot in the year 2023.
- The Emotion Machine , Simon and Schuster, due November 2006. ISBN 0-7432-7663-9
References
- http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/
See also
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External links
