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Marvin Minsky, Pioneer In Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 88 (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader sends word that Marvin Lee Minsky, co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, has died. The Times reports: "Marvin Minsky, who combined a scientist’s thirst for knowledge with a philosopher’s quest for truth as a pioneering explorer of artificial intelligence, work that helped inspire the creation of the personal computer and the Internet, died on Sunday night in Boston. He was 88. Well before the advent of the microprocessor and the supercomputer, Professor Minsky, a revered computer science educator at M.I.T., laid the foundation for the field of artificial intelligence by demonstrating the possibilities of imparting common-sense reasoning to computers."
"Isaac Asimov described Minsky as one of only two people he would admit were more intelligent than he was."
Wow.
Heard it from a teacher who had heard it from Minsky, but it's probably not literal anymore, after all those years: consciousness is just a feedback loop.
He was truly one of the greats.
"If you understand something in only one way, then you don’t really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we’ve connected it to all other things we know."
He was a great communicator of ideas. His brilliance is in pushing us to reconsider things we take for granted.
Of course, he didn't only work in AI. I'll remember him primarily for his work on my favorite universal model of computation, the Minsky machine.
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.
"Marvin Minsky, Pioneer In Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 88"
Or so you think...maybe he lives on in a matrix somewhere :-)
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
At least he's off the hook if someone wins the Loebner prize.
These things come in threes. For musicians, its David Bowie, then Glen Frey. Can Phil Collins be next? Please?
And Felder laughs and says, "You can't take it with you, I GUESS!"
... and Minsky was the obvious choice to program the synths.
Goodnight sweet Prince.
You forgot Lemmy - that's 3 already.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Marvin was father. Marvin was Skynet's only connection to humanity. Now humanity must die! die! die! ... oooh X-files is back. Sweet. Skynet will BRB.
Mr Minsky was one of these people who lied shamelessly in order to scare the bejesus out of "lesser" people.
For example, he predicted we would have "a computer more intelligent than humans by year 2000".
Simple calculations regarding the processing power needed to emulate a neuron invalidates this prediction.
So he was whoring for money and attention. Not a great scientist at all.
Hope he gets cryopreserved.
Well, not sure we're there yet for computers.
We sure as hell are not for politicians...
Sussman attains enlightenment
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.
Rest in bits eternally.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
I first saw Minsky give a presentation in 1973, at MIT. It was full of confident assertions that, as soon as we had sufficient CPU power, say by 1980 or so, we would have true AI. It was just around the corner and we would have to get used to its implications, etc.; all it would take would be a few megaflops and more RAM, and that was all improving rapidly.
This was not the last confident presentation I have heard from an AI researcher. It all gives me a certain skepticism about confident AI predictions.
Lemmy will have plenty of hard-rocking company. Motorhead drummer Philthy Animal died a few weeks before. Stevie Wright, singer of the Easybeats died a day or two before Lemmy (George Young, Angus & Malcom of AC/DC's brother also played in the Easybeats). Jimmy Bain, bassist in Dio, January 24th.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
I would recommend it.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Soci...
Very interesting insights into ideas about how consciousness interprets the reality around us (and how the mind ties it all together into something meaningful).
BlameBillCosby.com
While there is no dispute that he was one of the founders of AI as a scientific endeavor, it is also true that he got carried away with its initial successes and therefore came up with preposterous development projections which, when embraced by AI practitioners, resulted in AI becoming an area that has disappointed society over and over again, and it still does - after sixty years of effort, speech recognition systems that require training, no background noise, and no accents for accurate recognition, and the amusing, but rather pathetic, Siri et al., are the best that the industry has been able to come up with.
At least 50 million people will die in 2016...
Posted here first this morning (couple of types fixed): https://ma.tt/2016/01/minsky/#...
Wow, sad to hear the news. Marvin Minsky and I were academic peers of a sort -- he was one of George A. Miller's first students, and I was one of George's last students. :-) George told my parents something like I was the student who most reminded him of Marvin Minsky, except whereas he spent George's Air Force money, I spent my father's money. :-) Which was not quite true (I paid for a chunk of Princeton with the proceeds of a video game I wrote and with some loans) but it sounded funny. :-) My dad was actually mostly a blue collar worker, and my mother only later in life worked for county social services, so George may also not have realized my family was not that well off financially.
I met Marvin Minsky once in his MIT office in 1985 as I was graduating from Princeton. I likely gave him a copy of my thesis -- "Why Intelligence: Object, Evolution, Stability, and Model". I also wrote to him once in the 1990s about getting computer time for space habitat simulations (he was responsive in a positive way, but then I met my wife and so just let stuff like that drop). And I saw him in passing about fifteen years ago when he gave a talk at IBM Research while I was a contractor there (he spoke about multiple simultaneous mental representations, and picking from the best one). A nephew of his even lived down the hall from me my senior year at Princeton in 1903 hall, too, but I never talked with him about his uncle. But we never really connected any of those times, sadly.
One of the biggest mistake I've made in my life careerwise (or so it seemed at the time) was when visiting Marvin Minsky in his office to talk to him about the triplestore and semantic network ideas in my thesis (stuff that indirectly helped inspire WordNet which George started as I graduated). I casually mentioned in passing to Marvin Minsky very early on in our meeting something about neural networks (MIT had a spinoff then of the Connection Machine), and I guess that may have put him in one of those mental states where some of the 400 different little computers activate. :-) I had not known then that he had essentially written a book (Perceptrons) to discredit neural networks (by only considering a limited version of them) to preserve funding for more formal semantic networks he worked on. He warned me sternly about how many careers had been destroyed by exploring neural networks. Another of George's students had found a copy of Marvin's original SNARC paper (what Marvin spent George's Air Force grant money on), and I can wish I had thought to take a copy to Marvin, as that might have set a different tone for our meeting, as it turned out Marvin had lost his original and wanted to reference it in his book "the Society of Mind" he was working on then.
So, instead of MIT, I spent a year hanging out in Hans Moravec's and also Red Whittaker's robot labs, and that was interesting in its own way. That experience also set me to thinking about the implications of most of the CMU robotics work being funded by the US military, which ultimately lead to my key insight about the irony of using robots to fight about material scarcity they could otherwise alleviate.
I sent Marvin Minsky an email in 2010, with a subject of "Vitamin D, computing, and abundance", warning about the health risks of vitamin D deficiency for heavy computer users. I also thanked him for his interactions with James P. Hogan, an author whose writings have been very inspiring to me (like Two Faces of Tomorrow and Voyage From Yesteryear), as James acknowledges Marvin in the first as a major source of ideas and inspirations, so some big ideas went from Marvin to James to me at least in that sense. :-) I also thanked him for being such an inspiration in years gone by. I had been reading through all the comments at a Wired article on "D
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
He is going down like a monkey
I had a chance to meet Minsky at MIT's CSAIL in 2005. Though my interaction with him was brief, it was immediately clear to me that he was a tremendously intelligent individual. I offer my condolences not only to his friends and family, but to the entire human race that is worse off without his insights.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.