Marvin Minsky

Template:Short description Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox scientist Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research in artificial intelligence (AI). He co-founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory and wrote extensively about AI and philosophy.<ref name="dblp">Template:DBLP</ref><ref name="microsoft">Template:AcademicSearch</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref name=natureobit>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Minsky received many accolades and honors, including the 1969 Turing Award.

Early life and education

Marvin Lee Minsky was born in New York City, to Henry, an eye surgeon, and Fannie (Reiser), a Zionist activist.<ref name=natureobit/><ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref> His family was Jewish. He attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and the Bronx High School of Science. He later attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He then served in the US Navy from 1944 to 1945. He received a B.A. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1950 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1954. His doctoral dissertation was titled "Theory of neural-analog reinforcement systems and its application to the brain-model problem."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref name="minskyphd">Template:Cite thesis</ref><ref name="AIMag80th">Template:Cite journal</ref> He was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1954 to 1957.<ref>Society of Fellows, Listed by Term</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Minsky was on the MIT faculty from 1958 to his death. He joined the staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1958; a year later, he and John McCarthy initiated what was, Template:As of, named the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> He was the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences as well as professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.

Contributions in computer science

File:Confocal measurement of 1-euro-star 3d and euro.png

3D profile of a coin (partial) measured with a modern confocal white light microscope

Minsky's inventions include the first head-mounted graphical display (1963)<ref name="brief">Template:Cite web</ref> and the confocal microscope<ref name="confocal" />Template:NoteTag (1957, a predecessor to today's widely used confocal laser scanning microscope). With Seymour Papert, he developed the first Logo "turtle". In 1951, Minsky built the first randomly wired neural network learning machine, SNARC. In 1962, he worked on small universal Turing machines and published his well-known 7-state, 4-symbol machine.<ref>Turlough Neary, Damien Woods, "Small Weakly Universal Turing Machines", Machines, Computations, and Universality 2007, proceedings, Orleans, France, September 10–13, 2007, Template:Isbn, p. 262-263</ref>

Minsky's book Perceptrons (written with Papert) attacked the work of Frank Rosenblatt, and became the foundational work in the analysis of artificial neural networks. The book is the center of a controversy in the history of AI, as some claim it greatly discouraged research on neural networks in the 1970s and contributed to the so-called "AI winter".<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Minsky also founded several other AI models. His paper "A framework for representing knowledge"<ref>Minsky, M. (1975). A framework for representing knowledge. In P. H. Winston (Ed.), The psychology of computer vision. New York: McGraw-Hill Book.</ref> created a new paradigm in knowledge representation. Perceptrons is now more a historical than practical book, but the theory of frames is in wide use.<ref name="frames">Template:Cite book</ref> Minsky also wrote of the possibility that extraterrestrial life may think like humans, thus permitting communication.<ref name="minsky198504">Template:Cite magazine</ref>

In the early 1970s, at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, Minsky and Papert started developing what came to be known as 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 for the theory came from his work in trying to create a machine that uses a robotic arm, a videocamera, and a computer to build with children's blocks. In 1986, he published The Society of Mind, a comprehensive book on the theory which, unlike most of his previously published work, was written for the general public. Template:Gallery

In 2006, Minsky published The Emotion Machine, a book that critiques many popular theories of how human minds work and suggests alternative theories, often replacing simple ideas with more complex ones. Drafts of the book are available on his website.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Minsky also invented a "gravity machine" that will ring a bell if the gravitational constant changes, a theoretical possibility that is not expected to occur in the foreseeable future.<ref name=Pesta/>

Role in popular culture

Minsky was an adviser<ref>For more, see this interview, Template:Cite web</ref> on Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001: A Space Odyssey; one of the movie's characters, Victor Kaminski, was named in Minsky's honor.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Minsky is mentioned explicitly in Arthur C. Clarke's derivative novel of the same name, where he is portrayed as achieving a crucial breakthrough in artificial intelligence in the then-future 1980s, paving the way for HAL 9000 in the early 21st century:

In "The Law of Non-Contradiction", episode 3 of the television anthology series Fargo (Season 3), at least two allusions to Minsky are made. The first is through the depiction of a "useless machine": a device Minsky invented as a philosophical joke. The second is through the depiction of an animation of a robot called "minsky"—a character in a sci-fi novel called The Planet Wyh.

Personal life

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The Minskytron or "Three Position Display" running on the Computer History Museum's PDP-1, 2007

In 1952, Minsky married pediatrician Gloria Rudisch; together they had three children.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Minsky was a talented improvisational pianist<ref name="globe-obit">Template:Cite news</ref> who published musings on the relations between music and psychology.

Opinions

Minsky was an atheist.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> He was a signatory to the Scientists' Open Letter on Cryonics.<ref name="Letter">Template:Cite web</ref>

He was a critic of the Loebner Prize for conversational robots,<ref>Salon.com Technology |Artificial stupidity Template:Webarchive</ref> and argued that a fundamental difference between humans and machines is that while humans are machines, they are machines in which intelligence emerges from the interplay of the many unintelligent but semi-autonomous agents the brain comprises.<ref name="nytimes-obit">Template:Cite news</ref> He argued that "somewhere down the line, some computers will become more intelligent than most people", but that it was very hard to predict how fast progress would be.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> He cautioned that an artificial superintelligence designed to solve an innocuous mathematical problem might decide to assume control of Earth's resources to build supercomputers to help achieve its goal,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> but believed that such scenarios are "hard to take seriously" because he felt confident that AI would be well tested before being deployed.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Association with Jeffrey Epstein

Minsky received a $100,000 research grant from Jeffrey Epstein in 2002, four years before Epstein's first arrest for sex offenses; it was the first from Epstein to MIT. Minsky received no further research grants from him.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref name="jan2020">Template:Cite web</ref>

Minsky organized two academic symposia on Epstein's private island Little Saint James, one in 2002 and another in 2011, after Epstein was a registered sex offender.<ref name=":TheVerge">Template:Cite news</ref> Virginia Giuffre testified in a 2015 deposition in her defamation lawsuit against Epstein's associate Ghislaine Maxwell that Maxwell "directed" her to have sex with Minsky, among others. There has been no allegation that sex between them took place nor a lawsuit against Minsky's estate.<ref name="beast">Template:Cite news</ref> Minsky's widow, Gloria Rudisch, says that he could not have had sex with any of the women at Epstein's residences, as they were always together during all the visits to Epstein's residences.<ref name="timeGloria">Template:Cite magazine</ref>

Death

Minsky died of a cerebral hemorrhage in January 2016, at age 88.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Minsky was a member of Alcor Life Extension Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board.<ref name="AlcorBoard">Template:Cite web</ref> Alcor will neither confirm nor deny whether Minsky was cryonically preserved.<ref name="Alcor_News">Template:Cite web</ref>

Bibliography (selected)

• 1967 – Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines, Prentice-Hall
• 1969 – Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry, MIT Press
• 1986 – The Society of Mind
• 2006 – The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind

Awards and affiliations

Minsky won the Turing Award (the greatest distinction in computer science)<ref name="nytimes-obit" /> in 1969, the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1982,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> the Japan Prize in 1990,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence for 1991, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute for 2001.<ref name="franklinmedal">Marvin Minsky – The Franklin Institute Awards – Laureate Database Template:Webarchive. Franklin Institute. Retrieved on March 25, 2008.</ref> In 2006, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for co-founding the field of artificial intelligence, creating early neural networks and robots, and developing theories of human and machine cognition."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In 2011, Minsky was inducted into IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI Hall of Fame for the "significant contributions to the field of AI and intelligent systems".<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> In 2014, Minsky won the Dan David Prize for "Artificial Intelligence, the Digital Mind".<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> He was also awarded with the 2013 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Information and Communication Technologies category.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Minsky was affiliated with the following organizations:

• United States National Academy of Engineering<ref name="brief" />
• United States National Academy of Sciences<ref name="brief" />
• Extropy Institute's Council of Advisors<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• Alcor Life Extension Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board<ref name="AlcorBoard" />
• kynamatrix Research Network's Board of Directors<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Media appearances

• Machine Dreams (1988)
• Future Fantastic (1996)

See also

• List of pioneers in computer science

External links

• Scientist on the Set: An Interview with Marvin Minsky
• Consciousness Is A Big Suitcase: A talk with Marvin Minsky
• Video of Minsky speaking at the International Conference on Complex Systems, hosted by the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI)
• "The Emotion Universe": Video with Marvin Minsky
• Marvin Minsky's thoughts on the Fermi Paradox at the Transvisions 2007 conference
• "Health, population and the human mind" Template:Webarchive: Marvin Minsky talk at the TED conference
• "The Society of Mind" on MIT OpenCourseWare
• Marvin Minsky tells his life story at Web of Stories (video)
• Marvin Minsky Playlist Template:Webarchive Appearance on WMBR's Dinnertime Sampler Template:Webarchive radio show November 26, 2003
• Oral history interview with Marvin Minsky at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Minsky describes artificial intelligence (AI) research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Topics include: the work of John McCarthy; changes in the MIT research laboratories with the advent of Project MAC; research in the areas of expert systems, graphics, word processing, and time-sharing; variations in the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) attitude toward AI.
• Oral history interview with Terry Winograd at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Winograd describes his work in computer science, linguistics, and artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), discussing the work of Marvin Minsky and others.
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