Home > Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky (born August 9, 1927), sometimes affectionately known as "Old Man Minsky", is an American scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of MIT's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy.He was born in New York, where he attended The Fieldston School and
Bronx High School of Science. He later attended
Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts. He served in the US Navy in 1944-45. He holds a BA in Mathematics from Harvard (1950) and a PhD in the same field from Princeton (1954). He has been on the MIT faculty since 1958. He is currently Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Professor of electrical engineeringElectrical engineering is an engineering discipline that deals with the study and application of electricity and electromagnetism. Its practitioners are called electrical engineer s. Electrical engineering is a broad field that encompasses many subfields. and computer scienceIn its most general sense, computer science CS or compsci is the study of computation and information processing, both in hardware and in software. Introduction Computer science encomposses a variety of topics relating to computation, ranging from abstrac, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He has been awarded many honors. He is a member of both the U.S. National Academy of EngineeringFounded in 1964, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in the United States provides engineering leadership in service to the nation. The NAE operates under the same congressional act of incorporation that established the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of SciencesThe National Academy of Sciences (NAS in the United States is a government-established corporation supporting scientific research. Its official journal is the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences''. As its name suggests, it is the national acad. He won the Turing AwardTuring Award is given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery to a person selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the computer f in 1970, the Japan PrizeThe Japan Prize is awarded to people from all parts of the world whose "original and outstanding achievements in science and technology are recognized as having advanced the frontiers of knowledge and served the cause of peace and prosperity for mankind. in 1990, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2001.
Minsky's patentA patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a government to an inventor or applicant for a limited amount of time (normally 20 years from the filing date). The term "patent" originates from the term patere which means to lay open (to public inspectios include the first head-mounted graphical display (1963) as well as the confocal scanning microscope (a predecessor to today's widely used confocal laser scanning microscope) and, jointly with Seymour Papert, the first Logo "turtle". Minsky also built, in 1951, the first randomly wired neural network learning machine, SNARC .
Marvin 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."
During filming Minsky was almost killed due to an accident, but survived and went on to write the book Perceptrons (with Seymour A. Papert) which went on to become 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. However, the assertations put forth in the book about the fundamental limitations of artificial neural networks has since been shown to be based on a faulty assumption; Minsky and Papert assumed that the inability of the Perceptron to correctly solve the XOR problem was a fundamental property of neural networks and not, as we now know, a result of insufficiently advanced training algorithms.
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.
