Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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.
Calling consciousness 'just' a feedback loop is just a way of avoiding saying 'I don't understand what it is.'